From terrorist to a fighter of evil
March 04, 2006
A COMMANDER of Asia's most feared terror organisation who betrayed his comrades has helped capture 12 key terrorists in the past year.
Nasir bin Abbas -- the one-time lynchpin of Jemaah Islamiyah -- has spoken for the first time about his new life helping track down the very men he used to train.
The former top JI leader, weapons trainer and Afghanistan veteran of six years is now a full-time consultant to Indonesia's crack anti-terror squad, Detachment 88.
In an exclusive interview with The Saturday Daily Telegraph, the softly spoken former terror chief revealed he plays a leading role in counter-terror operations in the region.
The Malaysian-born Mr Abbas was arrested during a round-up of JI suspects in 2003 and spent 10 months in a Jakarta jail.
It is not clear how it was he came to roll over but he reappeared as a consultant to authorities with duties including talking to arrested JI members, encouraging them to open up to interrogators and re-educating them.
On October 1 last year, when suicide bombers walked into three Bali restaurants and detonated themselves, Mr Abbas was on the plane that night headed to Bali along with Detachment 88 chiefs.
"My duty is to re-educate the JI members who get arrested and to open their minds, to get them talking, to give them Islamic advice. I know what's inside their mind," he said.
"Most of them are mistaken about jihad, about fighting, about who is their real enemy. I explain to them the true understanding about jihad, most of them realise they are wrong. Then they open their mind and talk to the police," he says.
The 37-year-old is not afraid that his new role could lead to his death.
"I am worried but not afraid. As a human of course I do have a worry but I am not afraid," he says.
Mr Abbas, whose sister is married to Bali bomber commander Mukhlas, who is on death row for his role in the 2002 nightclub attacks, was in charge of terror group Mantiqi 3, which covered areas of the southern Phillipines, the Indonesian provinces of Sulawesi and Kalimantan and Malaysian Sabah.
He was sworn into the role, he says, in late 2001, by JI spiritual leader Abu Bakar Bashir and ran terrorist training camps in the southern Phillipines. Mr Abbas is also an Afghan war veteran, having spent six years there.
Abbas says that JI's suicide bombers from the first Bali bombing through to the second are motivated by the thought of becoming martyrs and ascending to heaven.
Last deadly second: Page 23
http://dailytelegraph.news.com.au/story/0,20281,18338354-5001021,00.html
One has to wonder about the sudden change in a jihadi,
but then maybe there is hope, one at a time.
His life has to be in danger, imagine, turning on the jihadi.