Published: September 17, 2009
BANGKOK — Over the past six years, Noordin Muhammad Top, considered to be the most violent Islamist militants in the region, had become an almost mythical figure among both those who sheltered him on the run and those who pursued him and finally killed him in
Indonesia on Thursday.
European Pressphoto Agency
A wanted posted for Noordin Muhammad Top, Indonesia’s most wanted Islamist militant.
While suspected of orchestrating the country’s main bombing attacks during those years, he repeatedly slipped away from capture, most recently in August when, after an all-night raid on a safe house, the police discovered they had killed the wrong man.
At a news conference on Thursday, the chief of the National Police, Bambang Hendarso Danuri, held up photographs of fingerprints that he said confirmed that this time, the man they had killed was Mr. Noordin.
Journalists joined the police in raising a cheer.
As the region’s main Islamist group,
Jemaah Islamiyah, turned away from large-scale violence in recent years, and as its leading figures were killed or captured one after another, Mr. Noordin, 41, became the most wanted terrorism suspect and a symbol of violent jihad.
He made a name for himself as the most skilled, inventive and dangerous bomb maker in the country, and was suspected of planning bomb attacks on the JW Marriott hotel in Jakarta in 2003, on the Australian Embassy in Jakarta in 2004, in Bali in 2005 and at the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta in July.
People who knew him and people who have studied his activities said Thursday that Mr. Noordin had a quiet magnetism that drew sympathizers to protect him, new recruits to join his splinter group and at least three women to marry and start families with him, giving him both cover and shelter.
“He was a quiet person, didn’t talk much, very pious,” said an Islamic clergyman, Abu Wildan, who knew him between 1993 and 2002 when he was a student and then the headmaster at Lukmanul Hakiem, an Islamic boarding school in Malaysia, where he was born.
“He prayed five times a day and was keen to look after and defend the Muslims’ rights,” Mr. Wildan said in a telephone interview. Mr. Noordin, who graduated from the University of Technology in Malaysia in 1991, taught computers, sociology and the Malay language at the boarding school, he said.
Mr. Noordin was also a networker, Mr. Wildan said, visiting friends who were sick and consulting with fellow teachers before making decisions at the boarding school.
The school preached the violent brand of jihad of
Abu Bakar Bashir, the godfather of Jemaah Islamiyah, and Mr. Noordin embraced its radical version of Islam.
Like many other militants, he fled to Indonesia to evade a Malaysian crackdown on militants that followed the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
By this time he seemed to have matured into a more focused and ambitious man, according to Nasir Abas, a former Islamist leader who defected to the government in 2003 and who was for a time Mr. Noordin’s commander.
“He is very well-organized,” Mr. Abas said in a telephone interview. “He is very charismatic. He is articulate, he is very good in influencing people to join his cause, giving encouragement and motivation.
“That’s why he was good in recruiting his followers.”
But it was luck and circumstance that turned him into a leader, said Sidney Jones, an expert on terrorism with the International Crisis Group.
He did not set out be become a bomb maker but began working with explosives when another militant, who had been hiding them, said he no longer wanted to keep them, Ms. Jones said, speaking by telephone from Jakarta.
“It was only when he was forced into a decision about having explosives that he became a leader and turned into a bomb maker,” she said.
“And from that time on his status grew within the radical fringe of the extremist network,” she said. “It continued to grow with each act and with his ability to elude the police. And so it was largely through flukes and an astonishing run of good luck, rather than skill on his part.”
After breaking with Jemaah Islamiyah, Mr. Noordin founded a splinter group that, Ms. Jones wrote recently, “models itself, in terms of ideology, targets, and propaganda, after
Al Qaeda. The question is whether he only imitates it or whether he has some structural affiliation.”
Mr. Noordin also made contacts and recruited supporters in a wide network that included Indonesia, Malaysia and the southern Philippines, according to Rohan Gunaratna, the head of the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
“He could preach a very radical version of Islam but could present it in a very, very simple way to attract students whom he managed to convince,” Mr. Gunaratna said in an interview.
Mr. Noordin’s death is a major victory for security forces, he said, but it will not mean an end to violence. “He leaves behind a significant network that will continue the fight.”
Sari Sudarsono contributed reporting from Singapore.
Comments