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Contrary to prosecutors’ claims, Muhammad Jibriel Abdul Rahman, a key suspect in the bombing of two luxury hotels in Jakarta last year, was never close with terrorist Noordin M Top, a witness testified on Tuesday.

Abu Wildan told the South Jakarta District Court that when Jibriel was studying at Lukmanul Hakim boarding school in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, he even sought to have Noordin “kicked out” because of his domineering teaching style.

Jibriel is being tried on charges of raising funds to bomb the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in South Jakarta last July.

“When [Jibriel] was about to complete his studies, he initiated a move to kick out Noordin from the school,” said Wildan, a former teacher at Lukmanul Hakim.

“Noordin was known as an authoritarian type of teacher during that time, and students wanted to oust him.”

Wildan testified for the defense to challenge prosecutors’ claims that Jibriel and Noordin maintained a close relationship as student and mentor.

In the indictment, prosecutors said Noordin, who is believed to have been the mastermind of several terrorist attacks in the country in recent years, had instructed Jibriel to secure Rp 100 million ($11,000) in Saudi Arabia, to which Jibriel allegedly obliged.

Hariyadi Nasution, a lawyer for the defense, said Wildan’s testimony proved that Jibriel and Noordin were not close.

“It’s clear that [the indictment] was a fabrication. There was no personal relationship between my client and Noordin,” he said, adding that the prosecutors’ charges were weak and confusing, arguing that they were based only on one e-mail.

Jibriel was arrested in August after police intercepted an e-mail he had allegedly written to his brother. In the message, Jibriel wrote that a man he identified as “Ustadz N” had been seeking funding for the biggest attack since the Sept. 11 strikes on New York. Ustadz means religious teacher in Arabic. Prosecutors say he was referring to Noordin.

Prosecutors also allege that Jibriel had met with Noordin, at one point Southeast Asia’s most wanted fugitive and the leader of a wing of the Jemaah Islamiyah militant network, and his close aide Syaifudin Zuhri to discuss an attack.

Noordin was killed in a shootout with police in September, and Syaifudin was killed in a raid in October.

Besides studying at Lukmanul Hakim, Jibriel also attended school in Karachi, Pakistan, before returning to Indonesia in 2005 to set up the Media Arrahmah Network, which operates an Islamist Web site and publishes books and videos on jihad.