“Sunakim, also known as Afif, is the one who was in jeans, a black T-shirt and a hat”, National Police Chief General Badrodin Haiti said here on Friday.
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Traffic is flowing and the road sweepers are busy but the police post which was hit remains boarded up, and the Starbucks cafe at the centre of the attack is surrounded by iron fencing, curious onlookers and media using anything at hand to peer over the top at the blown out windows. Twenty-four people were seriously wounded, including an Austrian, a German and a Dutchman.
If confirmed to be the work of Katibah Nusantara, which is made up primarily of Malay-speaking Indonesians and Malaysians, it would mark the first violence in Southeast Asia by the group.
Three men were arrested near Jakarta early on Friday, police told local media.
INDONESIAN law enforcers are determined to catch all responsible for the deadly bomb and gun attack on Jakarta, which has failed to dent the spirits of its defiant citizens.
The terrorist attack, for which the Islamic State has claimed responsibility, appeared to have been met with a shrug of the shoulders by the 10 million residents of Jakarta, as many expressed astonishment that the team of assailants killed only two people, despite striking a popular commercial and shopping area.
“We will not say how many people or what sort of evidence we have as it will upset out strategy”.
Indonesian police on Friday arrested three men on suspicion of links to the brazen attacks in Jakarta, and said they recovered a flag of IS from the home of one of the attackers. “Bali is safe”, said Yan Xiang Zhao, a tourist who had flown in from Taiwan with two friends.
“Whatever they did, they have killed life”, said Muji Sutrisno, a noted Indonesian intellectual.
“Islamic State fighters carried out an armed attack this morning targeting foreign nationals and the security forces charged with protecting them in the Indonesian capital”, Aamaaq news agency, which is allied to the group, said on its Telegram channel.
No Muslim-majority country in the world supports Isis, new research has shown as Indonesia reels from the group’s latest terror attack.
The blasts and gunfire that rocked Jakarta came after six years of relative calm, following a government crackdown that weakened the country’s most risky homegrown Islamic networks.
Alarm around the world over the danger stemming from Islamic State rocketed after the Paris attacks and the killing of 14people in California in December. The U.S.-based SITE Intelligence Group reportedly said that the message was also circulated among pro-ISIS groups on the message app Telegram. “We can say that the attackers were affiliated with the ISIS group”, he said.
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This week’s attacks in Jakarta, and the arrest of a Chinese Uighur there last month, will likely bolster China’s claim that the threat of terrorism within the mainland and overseas is growing.
