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The death of wanted terrorist Noordin M Top in a raid in Central Java on Thursday marks the end of a police chase for a man who the US State Department once said has been a suspect in every major anti-Western attack in Indonesia since 2002.

Noordin, who had escaped battles with police in which his associates died in 2005 and again last month, was the leading suspect in the July 17 attacks at the JW Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels in Jakarta that killed nine people, including two bombers.

He was the suspected mastermind behind the bombing of a nightclub in Bali seven years ago that killed 202 people, 88 of them Australians. Three men convicted of that attack — Amrozi, Imam Samudra and Ali Ghufron — were shot by firing squad last year.

Noordin was born in 1968 in Malaysia’s Johor state, which is next to Singapore. At about the age of 27, while studying for a master’s degree at nearby Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, he started attending lectures at a boarding school set up by regional terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah, according to International Crisis Group.

The school became a nerve center for JI, which advocates jihad to establish an Islamic caliphate ruled by Shariah law in Malaysia, Indonesia, the southern Philippines and southern Thailand. Its associates included Abu Bakar Bashir, JI’s spiritual adviser who was implicated in the 2002 Bali bombings, and Hambali, a suspected terrorist held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay.

Noordin became director of the boarding school, which had 350 students at one point, after authorities said it would be shut down unless it had a Malaysian director, according to the ICG.

Authorities closed the school shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Noordin headed to Indonesia. He settled with a friend in Central Java where they ran a repair shop for automobile shocks.

He then moved throughout the island and set up teams that bombed Jakarta’s JW Marriott in 2003 and the Australian Embassy the next year. The FBI called Noordin “an officer, recruiter, bomb-maker and trainer” for JI.

In 2004, Noordin began to split from JI’s core leadership, many of whom were arrested or hiding from the authorities. He trained three suicide bombers before they carried out a 2005 attack in Bali that killed 20 other people.

Three other suspects were killed in the Thursday raid and three people arrested. Police found documents, surveillance tools, firearms and explosives. Noordin escaped an Aug. 8 raids in which three suspected militants were killed and an alleged plot to bomb the president was foiled, police said.

Bloomberg