Terrorists could be planning to attack South-East Asia's busiest shipping lanes with a "crude nuclear device," Australian authorities warned in a report obtained yesterday. Over a quarter of the world's trade and half of its oil passes through the Straits of Malacca and the Singapore Strait. It also said al-Qaeda-linked regional terror network Jemaah Islamiah continued to thrive despite the arrest of 200 suspected members and appeared to be pursuing terror training and links with groups from the Philippines to Pakistan. "The overall picture ... is that South-East Asia remains a front line in the fight against terrorism. More attacks that threaten the safety and security of regional communities are inevitable," said an Australian government report.
Australian officials distributed the report at an anti-terrorism conference in Manila focusing on transport security and organised by the ASEAN Regional Forum, Asia's largest security forum that also includes the United States, Britain and other Western nations. The report warned waterways could be targeted in an attack using "a crude nuclear explosive device or radiological bomb."
"There is clear evidence of al-Qaeda's interest in attacking economic assets as a means of undermining the global economy, including attacks against shipping," the report said. It did not detail the evidence. "Despite the degradation it has suffered as an operational network, it retains an organisational structure, a determined approach to recruitment and training and a capacity to inflict further serious attacks in a number of regional countries," the report said. The arrests, including last year's capture in Thailand of Riduan Isamuddin, also known as Hambali, and heightened security cooperation, had made it harder for Jemaah Islamiah to stage large-scale attacks. Its decision-making has also been decentralised, making future attacks more varied, its scope wider and harder to predict, the report said.
One indication that the group was determined to survive was its effort to link up with organisations beyond South-East Asia, the report said, citing the discovery of a Jemaah Islamiah unit, identified as the al-Ghuraba cell, in Karachi, Pakistan, last year. The cell, composed of Malaysians, Indonesians and Singaporeans, was established to train future religious and military leaders, it said. Another Pakistan-based terror group, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, has also been linked to the Karachi cell, the report said. It said there were indications that Jemaah Islamiah was working with extremist groups in the southern Philippines "to the point of sharing training facilities and operational expertise." |