A Killer’s Last Stand

Azahari Bin Husin seemed to live a charmed life. One of Asia’s most wanted terrorists, Azahari, a Malaysian university lecturer who became a master bombmaker, had been on the run in Indonesia for three years and had repeatedly evaded capture—despite the biggest manhunt ever mounted by Indonesian authorities. On several occasions he slipped away just minutes before police showed up at his hideout. But last week Azahari’s luck ran out: he was killed during a shootout when police raided a house he had rented in the mountain resort town of Batu in East Java.

Indonesian police say their first break came in late October when they identified the three suicide bombers who killed 20 people in Bali on Oct. 1. That led to a massive surveillance operation in which they trailed scores of suspects believed to have links to the dead men. One of these individuals was a 27-year-old Indonesian calling himself Yahya Antoni. A police source told TIME that at 5 a.m. on Nov. 8, the day before the raid in which Azahari died, Yahya emerged from the Batu house. Having tapped Yahya’s mobile phone, authorities believed he was on his way to meet Azahari’s suspected chief accomplice, fellow Malaysian Nurdin Mohammed Top, in Semarang in Central Java. Yahya apparently spotted his tails during the journey. The police source says Yahya tried to detonate an explosives vest he was wearing but was arrested and later admitted he was a courier passing messages between Azahari and Nurdin. The source says that the information provided by Yahya prompted security forces to raid the Batu house.

By early afternoon on Nov. 9, a squad from Indonesia’s U.S.-trained anti-terrorist group Detachment 88 had surrounded the modest, single-story dwelling. Calls for surrender were met with bullets, police say, and a four-hour standoff ensued, during which Azahari and another man threw 11 explosive charges at officers. In the end, according to the police, Azahari was shot and killed before he could detonate his bomb vest, but his companion set off an explosion, killing himself.

In the wreckage police found a workshop for manufacturing small bombs suitable for suicide missions. A police source says 33 packets of explosives were discovered—one of which was already packed into a knapsack, while others were at various stages of assembly. The upshot: Azahari, 48, and Nurdin, 33, were almost certainly planning a string of fresh attacks.

Azahari’s death deals a serious blow to Jemaah Islamiah (J.I.), the Southeast Asian network of militants to which he allegedly belonged, and which is widely believed to have been behind the Bali bombings of last month and of 2002. But many militants are still at large, most notably Nurdin. Shadowy and less flamboyant than Azahari, Nurdin was given responsibility for planning and executing J.I.’s bombing campaign, which was launched by the group’s operations supremo Riduan Isamuddin (a.k.a. Hambali) at a terrorism summit in Bangkok in early 2002. (Hambali was arrested in Thailand in 2003 and is in U.S. custody.) As J.I.’s chief strategist, and as a charismatic recruiter, Nurdin is more dangerous than Azahari, says Sidney Jones, who heads the Southeast Asia office of the International Crisis Group. What’s more, adds terrorism expert Zachary Abuza of the United States Institute of Peace, Azahari has been passing his skills to a new generation of bombmakers who will be “only too eager to show their skills and avenge their teacher’s death.” Indeed, last Friday security forces found a videotape with instructions in bombmaking at a Semarang house they suspect was recently occupied by Nurdin. Police say the tape also contained statements by the Oct. 1 Bali suicide bombers in which they declare they will go straight to paradise once they die. The fear remains that more aspiring bombers may be walking Indonesia’s streets with heaven—and murder—on their minds.