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Posted on 01/18/2003 6:55:06 AM PST by knighthawk
Seven Western men were among 50 Indonesians who attended training camps organized and financed by al-Qaida in 2001 on the central Indonesian island of Sulawesi, an intelligence official said Friday.
Muchyar Yara, a senior intelligence official, said al-Qaida provided an undisclosed amount of money, along with weapons and explosives expertise, for at least 10 camps in the jungles near Poso in Central Sulawesi province.
The camps operated between March and November 2001, he said.
He said each camp had two or three trainers, one of whom was the son-in-law of the late Indonesian Abdullah Sungkar, the alleged founder of Jamaah Islamiyah.
The al-Qaida-linked group is believed to be behind the Oct. 12 Bali bombings which killed more than 190 people, most of them foreign tourists.
"Al-Qaida funded and provided weapons for these camps," he told The Associated Press. "The instructors were experts in the use of explosives and weapons," he said, declining to speculate where the trainers came from.
Muchyar said the seven Westerners trained at one of the camps, but he could not say where they were from. He denied telling the Australian newspaper, The Age, that he had identified one of the men as Australian cab driver Jack Thomas.
"We don't know the nationalities of the Westerners," Muchyar said.
Thomas, a 29-year-old Muslim convert from the southern Australian city of Melbourne, was arrested in Pakistan on Jan. 4. He is being held there on suspicion of terror links.
But a lawyer for Thomas' family in Melbourne said the allegation was "highly dubious" and had only been made to justify the man's continued detention in Pakistan.
"Why is it today that we see reports filter through even though it talks about something that has occurred two years ago?" barrister Rob Stary told the Australian Associated Press.
"I think it's remarkable, and I think it's done so the Pakistan authorities can try and justify their detention of him."
Stary said if there was genuine evidence against Thomas, his wife, who joined him in Pakistan but returned home after being injured, would have been interrogated when she visited her family in Sulawesi.
"That's why we say it's highly dubious," he said.
In December 2001, Indonesia's Intelligence Chief Lt. Gen. (ret.) AM Hendropriyono claimed that al-Qaida had operated training camps in Sulawesi, but he quickly retracted the claim after the police and the military denied the existence of such camps.
Last month, police in South Sulawesi said they had discovered three abandoned training camps where the alleged perpetrators of a deadly bombing of a McDonald's restaurant in December in Makassar, the provincial capital, trained for the attack.
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