Terrorist activity increases in Indonesia

On January 25th, around three months before US special forces killed the leader of the al-Qaida international terror network, Osama bin Laden, in a city in north-western Pakistan, Abbottabad, Pakistani intelligence officers in that town arrested an Indonesian terrorist, Umar Patek. A senior member of the Jemaah Islamiah (JI) group, who was wanted in connection with the 2002 Bali bombings, Mr Patek is alleged to have been seeking an audience with Mr bin Laden. He is presently being held at a secret location in Pakistan. According to Indonesia's National Anti-Terror Agency (BNPT), three countries-Indonesia, Australia and the US-are keen to extradite Mr Patek so that he can face charges related to the Bali bombings.

There is no evidence that Mr Patek was plotting attacks in Indonesia on this occasion. 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 terrorist training camp in the province of Aceh. 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 in Indonesia is increasing. On April 21st police in Jakarta defused nine bombs outside a Christian church. The devices, several of which were buried beneath a gas pipe, 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 the delivery of book bombs to the offices of a moderate religious leader, a former head of the police's anti-terrorism unit and 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 the International Crisis Group (ICG), a think-tank, recently concluded that Indonesia's terrorists had become more fragmented, with small cells planning attacks on the police and other local targets while receiving only limited support from regional groups such as JI and Jemaah Ansharut Tauhid (JAT), a group founded by an extreme Islamist preacher, Abu Bakar Bashir, in 2008. The three recent attacks appear to support the ICG's conclusions. Although he is alleged to have belonged to JAT, Mr Syarif seems to have been acting alone. The book bombs and the attempted church bombing were the work of the same small group, led by Pepi Fernando. But Mr Fernando, who was arrested on April 21st, was no expert bomb-maker. He is reported to have told police that he learned to make bombs by watching clips on a website, YouTube-a very different education from JI's chief explosives expert, Azahari Husin, who had a doctorate in engineering and learnt his skills in Afghanistan.

Nonetheless, three attempted attacks in the space of six weeks suggest that terrorist activity is on the rise again in Indonesia. The perpetrators may lack the expertise of figures like Mr Azahari, and they may for now have decided to direct their attacks towards local targets rather than foreigners, but Mr Patek's arrest 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, Mr bin Laden still has a following among Indonesian extremist groups such as JAT. The Indonesian authorities have rightly stepped up security following his death.