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Bomb-Making Materials Found in Islamic School
Yana Prima | July 15, 2009

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Cilacap, Central Java. The discovery of suspected bomb-making materials in a building in Cilacap, Central Java, on Tuesday has clouded the outlook for the traditional Islamic boarding school, or pesantren , that used the converted house, a representative for the school said on Wednesday.

The police raided the building for a second time on Tuesday and found chemicals that could be used to make explosives, as well as what is believed to be bomb-making equipment buried behind the building.

The materials included sulfur, potassium, cables and detonators.

The owner of the building, 60-year-old Bahrudin Latif, known as Bahridin, had left the house three days before the police raided it for the first time on June 23, based on suspicions that fugitive terrorist Noordin M Top was staying there.

An anonymous police source said that the authorities believed that Bahridin’s daughter, Ari Aryani, was married to Noordin.

The current whereabouts of Bahridin, who founded and managed the Al-Muaddib pesantren, remain unknown.

But a few days after the June raid, Mahfudz, one of the pesantren’s managers, said Bahridin called him on the phone and told him to take care of the school.

Mahfudz said that the pesantren closed shortly after the June raid.

“The school remains closed,” he said. “We don’t have any students.”

Aris Bunyamin, 41, a relative of Bahridin, said that he did not know about the suspicious materials. But he did say that he doubted that Bahridin was involved in terrorist activities.

“He spent a great deal of time running the pesantren,” he said.

“I doubt that he had the time to get involved with terrorists,” he said.

Rumiyati, who lives near the pesantren, also expressed surprise about the discovery of bomb-making materials. “We were all shocked,” she said.

People in the neighborhood knew that Bahridin’s daughter, who is more commonly known as Arina, had married a man from Yogyakarta, about 120 kilometers to the east.

The couple have two children, Rumiyati said, but nobody in the neighborhood near Bahridin’s pesantren had actually seen Arina’s husband.

“We are still looking for [Arina and Noordin], as well as Bahridin,” a police source said, on condition of anonymity.

“We believe that they are still somewhere in Central Java.”

Noordin is a highly wanted fugitive. He has been accused of planning and executing a number of terrorist attacks, and is suspected of being involved in the 2002 nightclub bombings in Bali, which left 202 people dead.

The police believe that he was also responsible for attacks on restaurants in Bali in 2005 that claimed 21 lives.

Noordin, a Malaysian national, has managed to evade several attempts to capture him. But one of his partners, fellow Malaysian Azahari Husin, was shot dead during a police raid in Batu, East Java, in November 2005.