JAKARTA: More than a dozen people have been arrested by Indonesian anti-terrorism
police, authorities said on Monday, as they beef up security in the world’s
biggest Muslim-majority country ahead of the Christmas and New Year holidays.
Police
said they detained 13 suspected militants in separate, pre-emptive raids over
the weekend across the Southeast Asian nation, which has long struggled with
Islamic militancy.
The
arrests took place in South Sumatra, East Java and West Kalimantan over the
weekend.
One of
the men arrested in Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-biggest city, was known to
have gone to Syria in 2013 and has links to Abu Jandal, an influential
Indonesian militant who fought with the Islamic State group in the Middle
Eastern country, authorities said.
Another
suspect was involved in a February terror attack in the Indonesian city of
Bandung, where a pressure cooker bomb exploded in a park before a gun battle
erupted nearby, leaving one militant dead.
Indonesia’s
anti-terror squad can detain and hold suspected extremists for seven days
without charge.
Indonesia
has suffered a string of deadly incidents, including a Christmas Eve attack in
2000 that left 18 dead and scores injured.
In 2002,
a bomb in a Bali nightclub killed over 200 people while, more recently, a
suicide bombing and gun attack claimed by IS in the capital Jakarta killed
eight people in January 2016. AFP
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