Indonesia: suicide attacks most likely carried out by JI offshoot

A multi-faith ceremony near the Ritz-Carlton and Marriott Hotels was being organised to show community solidarity.

Police and security analysts have said the attacks were most likely carried out by an offshoot of the militant Islamist group Jemaah Islamiah.

(…) Police are hunting for Noordin Mohammad Top, a fugitive Malaysian who heads a particularly violent offshoot of the Jemaah Islamiah network and has been linked to four major attacks in Indonesia since 2002.

Police are also looking for connections between Friday’s bombing and explosives discovered last week in the Cilacap region of Central Java. The explosives were buried in a garden at the house of Noordin’s father-in-law, who is also at large.

Noordin was said to be a key financier for Jemaah Islamiah but is now thought to have set up his own splinter group.

Jemaah Islamiah has links to al-Qaeda and has a long track record of bomb attacks in Indonesia, including the Bali bombings.

via BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Mourning as Jakarta probes bombs.

Police has confirmed that the bombers were challenged by hotel staff before the bombings and that the explosive used in the bombings has been used before by Jemaah Islamiyah:

An unexploded bomb left in a room of the J.W. Marriott in Jakarta resembled devices used in attacks on Bali and one found in a recent raid against the network on an Islamic boarding school in Central Java, national police spokesman told a news conference Sunday.

More here: Noor Huda Ismail, who knows very well how these suicide bombers are convinced to join JI:

“They sincerely believe what they did was right to defend other Muslims,” Mr. Huda says, explaining the thinking of some of the young men indoctrinated at Al Mukmin. “That’s what worries me.”

And me…

Huda cautions against seeing such men as “psychopaths,” however. “They have their own logic and make a rational calculation about what they’re doing.”

(…) “We were taught Islam is white or black, that it [hard-line jihadism] is the only salvation there is,” Huda says. “The only music we heard was … Arabic religious songs, from cracking loudspeakers,” Huda writes in an essay. In speech class, he says, he was taught that “the infidels and Jews would never stop fighting us till we followed their religion. When I was 15, it was my favorite topic, too.”