Terrorist activity increases in Indonesia

On January 25th, around three months before US special forces killed the al-Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden, in a north-western city in Pakistan, Abbottabad, Pakistani intelligence officers in that town arrested another terrorist, an Indonesian named Umar Patek. A senior member of the Jemaah Islamiah (JI) group wanted in connection with the 2002 Bali bombings, Mr Patek is alleged to have been seeking an audience with bin Laden. He is presently being held at a secret location in Pakistan. Although there is no extradition treaty between Indonesia and Pakistan, Indonesian officials have said that they may still seek Mr Patek's return.

There is no evidence that Mr Patek was plotting attacks in Indonesia. Until recently he was thought to have been in the southern Philippines, where he fled after the Bali bombings with another high-ranking JI member, Dulmatin. But Indonesian newspapers have recently reported a senior anti-terrorism official as saying that Mr Patek spent time in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, in 2009-10, and that he was involved in establishing a large-scale terrorist training camp in Aceh, a predominantly Muslim province on Sumatra. Although it is impossible to confirm, the official's statement seems credible: the Aceh camp, which was raided by police in early 2010, was led by Mr Patek's close associate, Dulmatin.

Meanwhile, there are signs that the terrorist threat is increasing. On April 21st police in the western suburbs of Jakarta defused nine bombs outside a Christian church. The devices, several of which were buried beneath a gas pipeline, had been set to detonate during a service the following morning for Good Friday. A week earlier a suicide bomber, Muhammad Syarif, blew himself up and injured 30 others at a mosque inside a police compound in Cirebon, West Java. That attack followed a series of book bombs delivered to the offices of a moderate religious leader, a former head of the police's anti-terrorism unit and to two other addresses in Jakarta on March 15th. No one was killed in those attacks.

Compared with Indonesia's past terrorist bombings, the latest series of attacks seem clumsy. Those responsible for the attempted church bombing even contacted an Arabic-language news broadcaster, Al Jazeera, to ask it to film the attack. Experts at a security-focused non-governmental organisation, International Crisis Group (ICG), recently concluded that Indonesia's violent terrorists had become more fragmented, with small cells planning attacks against the police and other local targets, while receiving only limited support from national groups, such as JI and Jemaah Ansharut Tauhid (JAT), a group founded by an Islamist extremist preacher, Abu Bakar Bashir, in 2008. Although the targets of the three recent attacks appear to support the ICG's conclusions, Indonesia's militants may be co-operating more closely than previously thought if it turns out that the attacks were linked-as police have suggested.

In any event, three attempted attacks in the space of six weeks suggest that terrorist activity is on the rise again in Indonesia. The terrorists may for now have decided to direct their attacks towards local targets, but Mr Patek's arrest in Abbottabad and the reports of his relatively recent presence in Jakarta suggest that the risk of al-Qaida-inspired attacks cannot be discounted altogether. Although Mr Patek was one of only a small number of terrorists in Indonesia to have had direct contact with al-Qaida leaders, bin Laden still has a following among Indonesian extremist groups, such as JAT. The Indonesian authorities have rightly stepped up security following his death.