The Family Behind the Bombings

The village of Tenggulun in Indonesia's East Java province is small (pop. 2,600), 200 kilometers from the nearest city Surabaya and not generously blessed by nature. The climate is dry and the soil arid. But Tenggulun is prosperous nonetheless: for decades, its residents have forsaken the surrounding teak forests and stunted cornfields to work in Malaysia, remitting money home to their families. Nur Hasyim, an 82-year-old quadriplegic, knows that pattern: at least four of his 13 children by two wives spent years crisscrossing back and forth between the two countries.

Tenggulun is also a very religious place — although Islam has been both a unifying faith and point of contention. In 1992, two of Nur Hasyim's sons founded a school to train local youngsters in the Wahhabi orthodox strain, one of Islam's severest forms of fundamentalism. The vast majority of Tenggulun's residents, however, follow the more moderate Islam of Nahdlatul Ulama, a religious society that has 40 million adherents across Indonesia. Rivalry between the two groups erupted one night in 1987, when a tomb of a local saint was burned down.

The culprit: Nur Hasyim's son Amrozi, the handsome, smiling terrorist trotted before television cameras by Indonesian authorities last week. According to the police, Amrozi has confessed to buying and transporting the explosives that killed 191 people in Bali last month. At the press conference, national police chief Da'i Bachtiar asked Amrozi, 39, about his involvement in the bombings, his accomplices and the years he spent in Malaysia receiving religious instruction. In a remarkable aside, Amrozi told his inquisitor, "I am a naughty person, sir. That's what my family always say about me. They say I'm not easy to control." In fact, the unfolding details of how a single hamlet in eastern Java spawned the Bali bomb plot — and many of its planners — tell a different story: of terrorists who rely heavily on blood ties and lean on family members to do their dirty work. In Amrozi's case, his own eagerness to please his stern older brother may have ensnared him in Asia's most brutal terrorist attack.

Amrozi revered his brother Ali Ghufron, two years his elder, who from boyhood had been the most devout of 13 siblings. Big brother's devotion would eventually veer into fanaticism and take him near the center of Asia's terror nexus: regional intelligence sources said last week they now believe he is one of the top two or three commanders of Jemaah Islamiah, the regional network of Islamic militants that has been blamed for a string of deadly bomb attacks in Indonesia and the Philippines. Ali Ghufron doesn't go by his boyhood name anymore: he is better known as Mukhlas, the name he adopted in exile in Malaysia. Yet no matter his name, to Amrozi he would always be big brother, the wise elder for whom the younger brother could never do enough.

Since 9/11, much has been written about the various fonts of terrorism: ideology, politics, disenfranchisement, hysteria. The tale of Tenggulun suggests it can also run in the family and provides unique insights into how terrorists are spawned and their operations hatched.

Amrozi, the fifth of the 13 siblings, was always something of a black sheep; his older brother Ja'far Shodiq agrees he was always the "naughty" one. Unlike his brothers, most of whom graduated from religious schools, Amrozi never got beyond junior high and was best known for determined wooing of village girls and roaring through Tenggulun on his beloved motorbikes. When he ran short of cash, villagers say, he occasionally filched and sold household belongings of his father, who had become relatively wealthy through holding the lucrative office of village secretary for three decades.

Three boys in the family — Mukhlas, Ali Imron and Amin Jabir — left the village to study at Ngruki, 400 kilometers to the east, at a school established by Abubakar Ba'asyir, the Muslim cleric widely believed to be the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiah and currently detained under suspicion of being involved in the Christmas 2000 Jakarta bombings. In 1992, two other brothers, Ja'far and Khozin, opened their own school in the village to teach Wahhabism. "We practically built it from scratch," says Ja'far. "We built it with our own hands." Amrozi wasn't involved in the religious activities or the teaching, although Ja'far confirms that Amrozi was the one who whipped up the village feud by torching the saint's tomb in 1987. Tombs are regarded as having special mystical powers by Nahdlatul Ulama followers, a belief regarded as primitive and blasphemous by adherents of Wahhabism. Even in a tiny hamlet like Tenggulun, the fundamental fissures about how to practice Islam cause tension between Abubakar's supporters and more moderate Muslims.

By all accounts, Amrozi wasn't pious, but his willingness to take violent action, say family members, confirms a pattern of idolizing and seeking to please his big brother. Ali Ghufron had left to seek his fortune in Malaysia in the mid-'80s. A few years later, Amrozi went looking for him. As he put it plaintively in an interview with Indonesian police, he "never came home ... we hadn't seen each other in such a long time."