Investigators will now be looking at the nature of the linkages between the attackers and Islamic State, said Judith Jacob, a terrorism researcher working on a Ph.D on the evolution of worldwide jihadism in Indonesia. Police did not identify the customer but said he or she suffered minor injuries.
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The rally, entitled “We Are Not Afraid of Terror”, is set to take place at 4 p.m. local time on Friday, according to a widely shared poster on social media.
“We have been informed by our intelligence that an individual named Bahrun Naim, based on the communications… instructed his cells in Indonesia to mount an attack in Indonesia”, said Karnavian.
The spokesman said that the national police anti-terror squad has been hunting for other jihadists across the country.
The attack was planned by an Indonesian militant called Bahrun Na’im, who is believed to be in Syria where he commands an Indonesian militant brigade, Jakarta Police Chief Tito Karnavian said Thursday.
Five men attacked a Starbucks cafe and a traffic police booth with hand-made bombs, guns and suicide belts, killing two people a Canadian and an Indonesian and injuring 20.
“An alert has been imposed throughout Indonesia”, said Charliyan.
Indonesian police believed Naim had masterminded the Jakarta attack and had been “planning this for a while”.
In a sign of public unease, a bang caused by a tire bursting triggered a bomb scare that sent police cars rushing back to the scene hours after the attack.
Indonesian police have explicitly likened the attack to the jihadist violence in November in Paris that left 130 people dead, and presented sobering proof to a horrified world of the reach and fanatical determination of IS adherents.
Two civilians and five attackers died in Thursday’s gun and bomb assault in a busy commercial district. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, and officials had said that the attacks were styled along the lines of the brutal Paris attacks a year ago.
Newspapers carried bold front-page headlines declaring the country was united in condemnation of the attack, which was the first in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, since the hotel bombings in 2009.
Like those attacks, the latest atrocity in Jakarta will be seized on to promote the USA agenda of militarism and security crackdowns throughout the region.
Security agencies fear what mayhem those Indonesians who have trained and fought with Islamic State might seek to create when they return home. It differed from Indonesian police on the number of attackers, saying there were four.
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Indonesian President Joko Widodo ordered security forces to hunt down the perpetrators and their network.
