No Regrets: Police say Amrozi admitted to his role in the Bali blasts
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What Amrozi didn't know was that his brother had fallen in with a group of fellow Indonesians living in Malaysia who shared both poverty and a militant brand of Islam. The leaders of the group were Abubakar and his mentor, Abdullah Sungkar. Both had fled Indonesia to avoid imprisonment by the government of then President Suharto for espousing radical views. Amrozi tracked his brother down to the town of Ulu Tiram in the southern Malaysian state of Johor. By then, Ali Ghufron was known by his new name, Mukhlas, and was a revered Uztadz (religious teacher) at a madrasah located 10 kilometers outside the town. At first, Amrozi was reluctant to force a reunion, fearing his lack of piety would not please Mukhlas. So, according to I Made Mangku Pastika, the two-star general leading the Bali investigation, Amrozi determined to make himself a better Muslim. Amrozi told police that for six months he supported himself as a motorbike mechanic in one of the numerous workshops that line the main road of Ulu Tiram. He prayed five times each day, and at night he read the Koran.
When Amrozi felt he was ready to seek his brother's blessing, he was brought into the Tarbiyah Islamiah Luqmanul Hakiem, an Islamic school founded by Sungkar in a sprawling patch of rubber and fruit trees near the tiny settlement of Sungei Tiram. The isolated spot is a perfect place for a radical Islamic school: it affords privacy and, with the country's main north-south highway only 20 kilometers away, the convenience of easy connections to the outside world — an important factor for the increasingly peripatetic clerics. "Sungei Tiram has always attracted radical Islamic teachers," says the village headman Haji Saad Shamin. "As far back as I can remember, there have always been madrasahs here that were started and later abandoned."
About 40 male students, some as young as five years old, studied at the school at any one time. Most were children of Singaporean Muslim parents. "They lived and prayed apart ... they never mixed with other villagers," says Saad. Like most madrasahs, the Tarbiyah began in a hut. Later, it sprawled to include a colonial-style single-story concrete building and another two-story brick-and-concrete annex.
Intelligence officials say that Southeast Asia's most wanted Islamic militants first congregated in Sungei Tiram: Abubakar; Sungkar, who died of natural causes in 1999; Mukhlas; and a veteran of the anti-Soviet fighting in Afghanistan, Riduan (Hambali) Isamuddin, alleged operations director of Jemaah Islamiah until recently. The four men used the madrasah as a base to recruit their earliest disciples, later fanning out to preach their message of radical Islam.
One of their first recruits was the increasingly faithful Amrozi. "At that time Mas (brother) Mukhlas often gave me religious guidance," Amrozi told police. "I also attended prayer gatherings and seminars given by Abubakar Ba'asyir. Since then I increasingly understood the real meaning of Islam. It was Mas Mukhlas who raised my awareness to fight the injustice toward Islam."
In 1995, having been deemed sufficiently pious, Amrozi was sent home. There he opened a garage, but other than his continued love of motorcycles, villagers say he was a changed man, always dressed in religious robes instead of the jeans he had previously favored. He hardly ever laughed or joked anymore. And he displayed a new, steely resolve. After Amrozi came back from Malaysia, says Pastika, he led a demonstration to topple the village head. "This shows that Amrozi does have initiative," says Pastika, "even though he only has a junior high school education."
Amrozi also solidified his ties to the tight-knit network of Islamic radicals of which he was now a full-fledged member. In March 1999 he married Khoiriyanah Khususiyati, a former neighbor of Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi, a Jemaah Islamiah bombmaking expert who was captured by Philippine authorities in January and confessed to involvement in a series of bombings in Manila in 2000. After his arrest, al-Ghozi led law enforcement officials to a cache of weapons and explosives amounting to almost one ton of TNT.
In 2000, police say, Amrozi was approached by a man named Imam Samudra, well known in Indonesia's radical circles, for help in obtaining bombmaking materials for use in the religious conflict then raging in the city of Ambon. "I went to Surabaya and bought the materials," Amrozi recounted later. "I sent those things to Ambon through an acquaintance of mine."