Oh not again, my happiness nowadays seems shortlived. First its the Mehsud and now the Noordin Top. Hell man its back.
BBCNEWS
The police say these were the men who attacked the two luxury hotels |
Indonesian police say DNA tests show that a militant killed in a weekend raid was not Noordin Mohammed Top, one of the region's most wanted men.
The dead man - killed at the end of a siege at a remote farmhouse in Central Java on Saturday - was named instead as a suspect in two 17 July bomb attacks.
Police sources had earlier said they had killed Malaysian-born Noordin.
He has been blamed for a number of attacks, including the July hotel bombs in Jakarta and the 2002 Bali attack.
"The dead body is Ibrohim... We tried to match the DNA with the sample from Johor [Noordin's son] and it didn't match," police spokesman Nanan Soekarna told a news conference.
Florist fixer
He said Ibrohim was a florist who had worked at the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in the Indonesian capital.
He is suspected of having helped prepare last month's twin attacks, which killed nine people, including six foreigners.
Police released new security camera footage showing a man identified as Ibrohim escorting the alleged Marriott bomber around the hotel on 8 July, and later bringing bomb-making material into the hotel's staff-only loading bay.
"Ibrohim was a planner who was always present in the meetings with Noordin Top," Mr Soekarna said.
Police said they believed Ibrohim was to have been a suicide bomber himself in a planned attack on the home of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
That plot was foiled in the security forces' attack last weekend on the Central Javanese farmhouse where explosives were found, police said.
Tributes have been left for those killed in the hotel attacks |
Acting on a tip-off, Indonesian police mounted the 16-hour siege of the farmhouse in which Noordin was initially claimed to have been killed.
Analysts had doubted the claims and media later reported police sources saying Noordin had probably fled the farmhouse about two hours before the raid began.
His reputation as the most wanted - yet most elusive - militant in South East Asia will only be burnished by the latest failure to catch him, analysts said.
He is believed to have formed a violent offshoot of the Jemmah Islamiah militant network, after the network split over the uses of violence.
As well as the 2002 Bali bombings, Noordin is thought to have been behind attacks on the Jakarta Marriott in 2003, the Australian embassy in 2004, and also on a series of restaurants in Bali in 2005 in which more than 20 died.
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