[lbo-talk] "Nerd" turns Islamist bombmaker?

[Grant Lee]

Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News CoverageMon August 18, 2003
10:11 AM ET

By Simon Cameron-Moore
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - No one really knows why Azahari Husin turned to
religion.
But whatever it was had a profound impact on the life of the 46-year-old
professor of statistics who studied in Britain and Australia and went on to
train as an Islamic militant in Afghanistan and the Philippines.
Today, the Malaysian academic, described by investigators as the top
bomb-maker of Jemaah Islamiah, Southeast Asia's link with al Qaeda and the
group blamed for last year's Bali attacks, is on the run.

* * * *

JI has been blamed for the Marriott Hotel bomb that killed 12 people and for
the Bali nightclub bombings that killed 202 people, mostly foreign
vacationers, last Oct. 12.

AN EXPLOSIVES "NERD"
Both blasts bore the hallmarks of either Azahari, dubbed the "Demolition
Man" by Malaysian newspapers, or of a top Indonesian pupil of his
bomb-making classes, fellow fugitive Dulmatin.
Police in Kuala Lumpur listed Azahari among their nine most-wanted a month
before the Bali attacks. They had given Indonesian police his name many
months earlier.
Azahari has been on the run, constantly moving, since late 2001 after
Malaysian and Singaporean police cracked JI cells.

* * *

Jemaah members interrogated in Indonesia say that, even while on the run,
Azahari is honing his expertise as a master of "improvised explosive
devices" and remote detonation.
"He's become a nerd, apparently going to Internet cafes to surf the net for
new tips on bomb-making," said Abuza, who is familiar with the
investigations.
SEARCHING FOR ISLAM
There was little to suggest radical tendencies in the young Azahari, a
gifted mathematician.
Azahari studied in Australia for four years in the late 1970s, when many
Malay students were drawn to the cause of political Islam under the
influence of the brewing Iranian revolution.
But neither radicalism nor religion interested him then. "He wasn't into
it," the security official said.
According to accounts gathered by police, he failed his engineering degree
in Adelaide because he spent too much time out enjoying himself.
He returned home to obtain his degree, and at the end of the 1980s went to
Reading University in southern England, where he impressed his tutors so
much they persuaded him to stay on to complete a doctorate. That was in
1990.
Soon after returning to Malaysia, some ex-students offered Azahari a
well-paid job in Indonesia. He still showed little sign of being the strict
Muslim he was later to become.
Back in Malaysia, two toddlers in tow, he and his wife became lecturers at
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia at Skudai in the southern state of Johor.
His epiphany occurred in the mid-1990s, when he fell under the influence of
the late Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Bashir, two exiled Indonesian
preachers spouting notions of jihad, or holy war, and accused of being
Jemaah's founding fathers. Bashir is on trial for treason in Jakarta.
It was around that time that his wife developed throat cancer. She survived,
but lost the power of speech. Unable to teach, she now depends on a
government pension.
Police wonder whether his wife's illness, which struck soon after the birth
of their second child, a boy, could have been the catalyst for the change in
Azahari.
Whatever the truth, he went on to train in Afghanistan and the southern
Philippines in the late 1990s, developing a passion for making bombs.
"From what we heard, it was after going to the Philippines that he became
obsessed with making bombs," the security official said.

http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=ourWorldNews&storyID=3294461