Tuesday December 7, 2010
Assassination plan foiled
By AMY CHEW
[email protected]
Indonesian terrorist suspect Fadli Sadama, center, is escorted by police officers upon arrival following his deportation from Malaysia, at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Jakarta, Indonesia, Saturday, Dec. 4, 2010.
PETALING JAYA: Terrorist plans to attack foreigners in Sumatra, including assassinating American executives of a giant oil company, have been foiled with the arrest of a suspected Indonesian militant in Malaysia. Fadli Sadama, 27, was nabbed on Oct 13 while travelling in a bus to Johor. He was deported back to Jakarta last Saturday under heavy guard.
Sadama had allegedly planned to assassinate oil executives working for PT Chevron Pacific Oil company in Pekanbaru, capital of the oil-rich province of Riau. “He (Sadama) planned to kill American executives of Caltex (now renamed Chevron) by shooting them,” Petrus Golose, director of the Indonesian National Anti-Terror Agency (BNPT), told The Star in a telephone interview from Jakarta.
He said Sadama also planned to shoot foreign tourists travelling in small boats to the active volcano Anak Krakatau or Child of Krakatau. (Anak Krakatau was formed on the site of the historic 1883 blast of Krakatau volcano and is located in the Sunda Straits between Sumatra and West Java.)
Golose said Sadama was a member of the Indonesian Mujahidin Group (KMI) and was recruited by convicted Indonesian terrorist Toni Togar, who is serving a 20-year jail sentence for his role in the J.W. Marriot bomb blast in 2003. KMI was set up and headed by Togar while he was behind bars at the Pematang Siantar penintentiary in North Sumatra.
Sadama, a loyal supporter of Togar, was planning to free him from the penitentiary. “He plotted to kidnap the chief prison warden of Pematang Siantar to be used as a barter to free Togar,” said Golose. “If Sadama and his group succeeded in freeing Togar, they planned to go to southern Thailand to train with the separatist Pattani United Liberation Organisation,” he said.
Togar has since been moved to the maximum security prison island of Nusa Kembangan in Central Java. Police said Sadama had been the field operator of KMI since 2008 and believed to have “a few people” in Malaysia and Thailand who provided safe houses for him when he escaped a police dragnet after allegedly robbing CIMB Niaga Bank in Medan on Aug 18.
“He flew on Wings Air to Malaysia from Medan on Sept 18, a month after the bank robbery,” said Golose. He said the Indonesian police was grateful to the Malaysian police for their help and co-operation in arresting Sadama, which helped prevent the terror attacks.
