This Article is From Sep 22, 2010

Gunmen storm Indonesian police station

Gunmen storm Indonesian police station
Jakarta: Heavily armed men shot and killed three Indonesian police officers early Wednesday, just days after the police had raided what they said were Islamic militants linked to a series of violent bank robberies.

About 10 men armed with weapons including automatic rifles stormed a police station on the outskirts of Medan, the capital of North Sumatra Province, killing the police officers and attempting to set fire to police cars, said Brig. Gen. Ketut Untung Yoga Ana, deputy spokesman for the national police.

"Of the three who were killed, two were guarding out front and one was watching the prisoners," General Untung said, adding that the police had not had the chance to return fire.

The attackers appeared to be well trained and the attack carefully planned, he said. "According to witnesses," he said, "over the last two or three days there were a number of vehicles that at certain hours would drive back and forth in front of the station."

The attack followed a series of raids in North Sumatra last weekend in which the police killed three militancy suspects and arrested more than a dozen others. High-powered weapons and dynamite were confiscated in the raids, one of which took place near the police station that was hit.

The police said that those killed and captured in the raids were members of a group called Al Qaeda of the Veranda of Mecca, which is thought to have staged a series of armed robberies in North Sumatra that netted at least 700 million rupiah, or $78,000. One robbery last month at a CIMB Niaga branch in Medan left a police officer dead.

The police said they believe the robberies were intended to raise money for the group, which had set up a training camp in the northern province of Aceh that was broken up by the police earlier this year.

"What we saw before at the CIMB bank was connected with the training in Aceh," said Inspector General Iskandar Hasan, the national police spokesman. "We can't confirm it yet, but we suspect there is a pattern, and if the bullets from this attack match those from CIMB then we can confirm they are connected."

The Indonesian police have arrested and killed scores of terrorism suspects since discovering the Aceh training camp earlier this year, including Dulmatin, a regional militant leader who was shot and killed by the police in March.

One of Indonesia's top radical Islamic leaders, the elderly cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, was arrested in August for allegedly helping set up and finance the Aceh group. The police say the organization has planned attacks on targets including President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, foreign embassies, luxury hotels and the national police headquarters.

The Indonesian police have largely been praised for curbing Islamist militancy in the Muslim-majority country, where attacks including the 2002 and 2005 nightclub bombings on Bali have killed more than 200 people, mostly foreigners. The last major attack was the suicide bombings of two hotels in Jakarta in July 2009, which killed seven. But analysts have warned that militant groups have proved highly adaptable, re-forming and changing tactics in response to successive crackdowns.

The attack Wednesday on the police, if proven to be the work of terrorists, indicates a shift from spectacular bombings of Western targets to more focused attacks on the Indonesian state itself, said Jim Della-Giacoma, the Southeast Asia director of the International Crisis Group."We think there has been a clear shift from the so-called far enemy to the near enemy, from the targets of Western symbols to the near enemy, which is Indonesian government officials," he said.
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