Explosives and heavy gunfire were heard early on Saturday as police moved in on the remote building near the village of Beji where Noordin Mohammed Top was believed to be hiding with a number of accomplices.

Smoke billowed out of holes in the roof of the rural house as police laid siege to the building for 17 hours.

“A police line has been put around the house,” Step Vaessen, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Jakata, said.

“There has been no official confirmation that Noordin Top is really inside the house, but all sources are telling us that he is there and he has been shot dead.

“In the last few hours we saw an increase in violence at the house; a lot of shooting; a lot of explosions, so it was really hard to imagine that there was someone still alive in the house,” she said.

“Five police officers went inside the house – we heard shots from inside the house – and then they came out in a very cheerful mood, giving each other high-fives, showing that the whole thing was finished.”

Witnesses said that at least two body bags were removed from the house shortly after the shooting had ended.

Noordin is the Malaysian-born head of an Islamist splinter group with connections to Jemaah Islamiyah.

Second raid

Also on Saturday, Indonesian police killed two suspected Islamic fighters and seized up to 500kg of bomb-making material after a raid on a house in Bekasi, near Jakarta, police said.

Bambang Hendarso Danuri, the national police chief, said that the raid was linked to the operation in Central Java and targeted a “cell of NMT,” referring to Noordin.

“We had to shoot them because at the time of the raid they had hand-held bombs that were about to be thrown at the police,” he said.

“They were would-be bridegrooms [suicide bombers] with special  targets for attacks to be carried out two weeks from now.”

Al Jazeera’s Step Vaessen said: “Two bombs have been found, which, according to police sources, were going to be used to bomb the president’s house not far from where they were found.”

Separately, Nanan Soekarna, the national police spokesman, said police had identified the two suicide bombers – a 19 year-old man and 28 year-old man – who carried out deadly attacks on the Jakarta hotels last month.

The July 17 attacks on the Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels killed nine people and wounded 53 others, including Indonesians and foreigners.

The bombings broke a four-year lull during which there had been no major attacks.

Noordin, a Malaysian citizen, is also believed to have played a major role in four other bombings inIndonesia since 2002, including nightclub bombings on the resort island of Bali that year that killed 202 people.

In a video in 2005, he claimed to be al-Qaeda’s representative in Southeast Asia and to be carrying out attacks on Western civilians to avenge Muslim deaths in Afghanistan.

Taken From: Al Jazeerah.net

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