JOIN USAn audacious attack by suicide bombers in the heart of Indonesia's capital was funded by the Islamic State group, police said today, as they seized an IS flag from the home of one of the attackers and carried out raids across the country in which one suspected militant was killed.
National police chief Gen Badrodin Haiti told reporters that yesterday's attack was funded by IS through Bahrun Naim, an Indonesian who spent one year in jail for illegal possession of weapons in 2011, and is now in Syria fighting for the group.
Supporters of IS also circulated a claim of responsibility for the attack on Twitter late yesterday. The radical group controls territory in Syria and Iraq, and its ambition to create an Islamic caliphate has attracted some 30,000 foreign fighters from around the world, including a few hundred Indonesians and Malaysians.
The IS link, if proved, poses a challenge to Indonesian security forces. Until now, the group was known only to have sympathizers with no active cells capable of planning and carrying out a plot such as yesterday's in which five men attacked a Starbucks cafe and a traffic police booth with handmade bombs, guns and suicide belts. They killed two people, one a Canadian and the other an Indonesian, and injured 20 in the first major attack in Indonesia since 2009.
The militants were killed, either by their suicide vests or by police.
The attack "was funded by ISIS in Syria through Bahrun Naim," Haiti told reporters after Friday prayers, using an acronym for the Islamic State group. He did not elaborate.
He also identified one of the five attackers as Sunakim, who in 2010 was sentenced to seven years in jail for his involvement in military-style training in Aceh, but was released early.
Police conducted raids across Indonesia but was it unclear whether those arrested were suspected of links to the bombing or if police were rounding up militants as part of a broader crackdown in its aftermath. They also outlined a partial reconstruction of events based on security camera video, part of which showed a Starbucks customer escaping from the grip of a bomber before he detonated his suicide bomb.
Police did not identify the customer but said he or she suffered minor injuries.
National police spokesman Maj Gen Anton Charliyan said an IS flag was found in the home of one of the attackers and raids were conducted in Java, Kalimantan and Sulawesi, with four arrests made. Charliyan said three men arrested at dawn in their homes in Depok on the outskirts of Jakarta are no longer suspected of being linked to the attack.