Inside The Bali Plot

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Amrozi tracked his brother to the town of Ulu Tiram in the southern Malaysian state of Johor. By then Ali Ghufron was known as Mukhlas and was a revered teacher at a madrasah. Amrozi feared his lack of piety would not please Mukhlas. So, according to I Made Mangku Pastika, the general leading the Bali investigation, Amrozi prayed five times each day and read the Koran each night. When he felt he was ready to seek his brother's blessing, he was brought into an Islamic school near the tiny settlement of Sungei Tiram. The school was Militant U. Among those who gathered there, according to regional intelligence officials, were Abubakar, Sungkar (who died of natural causes in 1999), Hambali and Mukhlas. The four men used the madrasah as a base for recruiting their earliest disciples. One of the first was Amrozi. "It was Mas [brother] Mukhlas who raised my awareness to fight the injustice toward Islam," Amrozi told police.

The Two Brothers
In 1995 Amrozi was sent home and there opened a garage. Villagers say he was a changed man, always dressing in religious robes instead of the jeans he had previously favored. In 2000, police say, Amrozi was approached by Samudra for help in obtaining explosives for use in the conflict between Muslims and Christians then raging in the Indonesian city of Ambon. "I went to Surabaya and bought the materials," Amrozi later recounted.

Meanwhile, his big brother had been even busier. He spent time in Singapore recruiting a group to conduct surveillance of possible targets for terrorist strikes. According to Singaporean police, Mukhlas employed his relatives. One of those arrested in January 2000 was Hashim bin Abbas, his brother-in-law. The team's plans were foiled when a group of Islamic radicals associated with Hambali botched a bank robbery in a Kuala Lumpur suburb. Two of them were killed, and one was captured. Astonished Malaysian police began piecing together the world of militant Islam. More raids and arrests followed, and these led police to the Sungei Tiram madrasah, which was shut down in May 2001.

Mukhlas, forewarned, had fled back to Tenggulun. In late 2001, according to police and intelligence officials, he and Hambali traveled to Afghanistan. It is not clear if Mukhlas was at the meeting in Thailand at which Hambali announced his soft-targets strategy. But regional intelligence officials say they are certain that Hambali soon handed over day-to-day control over JI's terrorist operations to Mukhlas. "Hambali was too well known," a Malaysian official says. "He could still give orders, but he had to get out of the region."

Mukhlas and Hambali, says Rohan Gunaratna, author of a leading work on al-Qaeda, are similar in style. "They are both very experienced operatives who speak little but demonstrate their thinking through action." They share a ruthlessness in delegating the most dangerous jobs to subordinates, friends or family. Among the 19 killed by the 15 bombs that went off in Jakarta on Dec. 24, 2000, were three of Hambali's own men. Regional intelligence officials believe that Mukhlas was intimately involved in conceiving and planning the Bali attack, although he appears to have delegated operational authority to Samudra.

The Three Strangers
Amrozi met with Samudra several times in August and September this year to discuss Bali, according to his confession to Indonesian police. The last time they met, "we had a chat after praying together at the Great Mosque in Solo," he said to police. Samudra told Amrozi he would send some cash. Amrozi bought the van and the chemicals used in the bombing and ferried them to Bali. When he, Samudra and a number of the other planners met at the resort island, Amrozi was reminded of his place in the pecking order. "At one point I asked them where I was supposed to take the car and explosives," Amrozi recounted. "But [Samudra] told me it was not my business anymore." According to a source familiar with a Nov. 15 interrogation, Amrozi disclosed that the target of the group's main bomb was changed at the last moment by the intervention of three mysterious strangers. Originally, Amrozi told his captors, the group had planned to target only the U.S. consulate in Denpasar, Bali's capital. But the strangers suggested that only a token bomb be left at the empty consulate; the main effort was to be concentrated on the Kuta bars.