The former Indonesian president, Abdurrahman Wahid, believes military intelligence has an active role in jihad activity committed in his country. This might explain why cleric Abu Bakar Bashir’s prison sentence was reduced. From the The Australian:
In an interview with SBS’s Dateline program to be aired tonight, on the third anniversary of the bombing that killed 202 people, Mr Wahid says he has grave concerns about links between Indonesian authorities and terrorist groups.
While he believed terrorists were involved in planting one of the Kuta night club bombs, the second, which destroyed Bali’s Sari Club, had been organised by authorities.
Asked who he thought planted the second bomb, Mr Wahid said: “Maybe the police … or the armed forces.”
“The orders to do this or that came from within our armed forces, not from the fundamentalist people,” he says.
The program also claims a key figure behind the formation of terror group Jemaah Islamiah was an Indonesian spy.
Former terrorist Umar Abduh, who is now a researcher and writer, told Dateline Indonesian authorities had a hand in many terror groups.
“There is not a single Islamic group either in the movement or the political groups that is not controlled by (Indonesian) intelligence,” he said.
Abduh has written a book on Teungku Fauzi Hasbi, a key figure in Jemaah Islamiah (JI) who had close contact with JI operations chief Hambali and lived next door to Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir.
Please read it all.