JAKARTA – Police in eastern Indonesia have arrested two suspected terrorists allegedly involved in bank robberies to fund their activities, the national police spokesman said Sunday.
“They were riding a motorcycle on a street when an anti-terror police squad arrested them on Friday” in the town of Bima in West Nusa Tenggara province, Saud Usman Nasution told AFP.
He said the suspects were part of a terror group that killed a police officer in a 2010 bank robbery in the north Sumatra town of Medan, allegedly to fund terrorist activities.
Nasution said they were also allegedly involved in a militant training camp in Sumatra’s Aceh province, which was linked to radical Islamic cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, who was jailed for 15 years for funding the exercise.
“They have been flown to the capital Jakarta and are being interrogated by anti-terror police investigators,” Nasution said.
Most of Indonesia’s 200 million Muslims are moderates, but the country has struggled to deal with numerous attacks by radical extremists such as the Al-Qaeda-linked
Jemaah Islamiyah, which carried out the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people.
The country’s counter-terrorism squad last month gunned down five suspects in two raids on the popular tourist island of Bali. Police suspected that group was planning a bank robbery to finance several terror attacks.