Inside The Bali Plot

The

city-state of Singapore is an impeccably well-ordered place. Bubble gum, for instance, has been banned for 10 years because it is too messy. One year ago, Islamic terrorists hatched a plot to wreck the island's placidity. They planned to bomb the U.S., Australian and Israeli embassies, Singapore government buildings, and locales where sailors from the U.S. Navy's Seventh Fleet congregated. Singapore is well policed, however, and the plot was discovered; 13 people were arrested. But although the bombers were foiled, law-enforcement agencies around the world, still digesting the attacks of Sept. 11, recognized that a new front in the terrorists' war had just opened in Southeast Asia.

The most brutal act of the war in Southeast Asia happened on Oct. 12, when two coordinated bombs killed, at the last count, 191 people — mainly vacationers out for a night's dancing — in two of the bars in the village of Kuta on the Indonesian island of Bali. Since the bombings, Indonesian police have arrested 20 people said to have taken part in the plot. One of them is a man called Amrozi, who has confessed to transporting explosives to the site and was arrested a month after the bombings in his home village hundreds of miles from Bali on the island of Java. Another is Imam Samudra, allegedly one of the key planners of the attack, who was picked up on Nov. 21 after Indonesian police tracked his cell phone. TIME has discovered, however, that investigators believe the incident's real godfathers — those described by one Western intelligence source in the region as the "top tier of the operation, not the foot soldiers or even the sergeants and captains like Samudra"--remain at large. Law-enforcement officials think that these men will prove to be the link, long suspected, between Southeast Asian terrorist groups and the international network of Meanwhile, both the nature of the terrorists' targets and the methods they use to garner recruits have become clear.

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A New Kind of Target
Six weeks after the Singapore plot was foiled, according to an fbi report, a meeting of terrorists took place in a village in southern Thailand. The gathering was held at the behest of Riduan Isamuddin, a leader of an organization based in Indonesia called Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) that has long been suspected of acting as a cover for terrorist acts. Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, fought in Afghanistan with the anti-Soviet mujahedin in the 1980s and is wanted by authorities in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia. He was last seen in January 2001, when Indonesian authorities sought his arrest for involvement in a series of bombings the previous month that left 19 dead and scores wounded.

According to the fbi account, Hambali was furious at the failure of the Singapore plot and used the meeting in Thailand to announce an abrupt change in strategy. His group would avoid the risky business of attacking "hard targets," those located in big, well-policed cities or sites with obvious symbolic value. Instead, the terrorists would seek places where Americans or their allies went to shop, eat or vacation. Bali was the epitome of what they were aiming for; among those killed by the Kuta bombs were an estimated 75 Australians, 22 Britons and 7 Americans. Hambali may now be in Bangkok or Pakistan. But Indonesian authorities have identified a person they claim to be the new leader of the terrorist cells within JI — Ali Ghufron, a radical Islamist from the village of Tenggulun in eastern Java. Amrozi is Ali Ghufron's younger brother.

A Family Business
Tenggulun is a very religious place. In 1992 two brothers of Ali Ghufron and Amrozi founded a school there to train local youngsters in Wahhabism, one of Islam's most severely orthodox strains. Most of Tenggulun's residents follow the more moderate Islam of Nahdlatul Ulama, an Indonesian religious society. Rivalry between the two groups erupted in 1987, when the tomb of a local saint was burned down. The culprit was Amrozi.

The fifth of 13 siblings, Amrozi was always something of a black sheep. At a televised press conference after his arrest last month, he told Indonesian national police chief Da'i Bachtiar that he was "a naughty person, sir — that's what my family always say about me." Unlike his brothers, most of whom graduated from religious schools, Amrozi never got beyond junior high and was best known for roaring through Tenggulun on one of his beloved motorbikes.

Amrozi revered Ali Ghufron, who was two years older and the most devout member of the family. In the 1970s Ali Ghufron, with his brothers Ali Imron and Amin Jabir, left Tenggulun to study at Ngruki, 250 miles to the east, in a school established by Abubakar Ba'asyir, a Muslim cleric widely believed to be the spiritual leader of JI. Ba'asyir is currently detained on suspicion of being involved in the series of bombings in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta in Christmas 2000. In the mid-1980s Ali Ghufron went to study in Malaysia, and a few years later Amrozi set out to look for him. Ali Ghufron had fallen in with a group of fellow Indonesians living in Malaysia, led by Abubakar and his mentor Abdullah Sungkar, who shared poverty and a militant brand of Islam. Abubakar and Sungkar had fled Indonesia to avoid being thrown in prison by the government of President Suharto for espousing radical views.