FOCUS: Calm prevails at former terror school

Asian Political News, Oct 6, 2003

ULU TIRAM, Malaysia, Sept. 29 Kyodo

The Luqmanul Hakiem religious school in the rural heartland of southern Malaysia offers a perfect picture of tranquility, marred only by its notorious past.

The boarding school was formerly run by radical Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, who was recently jailed in Indonesia on treason charges.

Hambali, who is suspected of being the guiding force in a string of attacks in the region, including last year's Bali bombings, and Imam Samudra and Mukhlas, both convicted for their involvement in the bombings, all taught young students there to fight the enemies of Islam and also planned their terrorist acts.

''They were all there before. They used the school to train their cadres like the suicide bombers,'' a Malaysian intelligence official involved in the investigation told Kyodo News.

The school was set up in the early 1990s by Bashir and Abdullah Sungkar, spiritual leaders who together with their devout disciples Hambali and Samudra, fled to Malaysia in the 1980s to escape then President Suharto's crackdown on religious extremism.

Quietly, they moved through several states, preaching their radical brand of Islam and picking up more disciples along the way until they settled in Ulu Tiram in southern Johor state.

But it was not only the school that Bashir and Sungkar, who died in 1999, set up, authorities believe.

They were also the suspected brains behind Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), widely regarded as the Southeast Asian branch of the al-Qaida terror network, and Luqmanul Hakiem was to play a crucial role in their scheme to ultimately turn Southeast Asia into a pan-Islamic nation through a bloody revolution.

The secluded school hardly attracted any attention, although shopkeeper Azhar from a nearby village said he felt something strange about it.

''Their teaching appeared extreme for a religious school. They seemed more like a deviant cult,'' he said, describing tales of how students were made to stay at a graveyard at night or go through jungle training.

Other than that, Azhar said they appeared polite, ordinary people, hardly the masterminds of the bombings of last October's Bali bombings that killed more than 200 people, mostly Westerners.

One of the reasons not much was known about the school then was also because of its ''foreign'' culture. The school accommodated some 300 students annually, most of them from Singapore and Indonesia.

Many Muslim parents from Singapore sent their children to the school. They helped to fund the school and authorities believed some knowingly aided the school's hidden militant agenda.

Azhar said one reason why not many local villagers sent their children there was because of the high tuition fees.

While it is not known how much money was collected through the school, Singapore Home Ministry official Ong-Chew Peck Wan once asserted that the school, which catered to children of JI members as well as children of non-JI members, was essentially supported by funds collected by the JI network in both Malaysia and Singapore.''

Less than an hour's drive from the school is the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), a government university from where Bashir managed to snare several valuable disciples.

Chief among them is Azahari Husin, a mathematician with a PhD from Reading University in Britain, who is hailed as the top bomb expert in JI.

Following the arrest of Hambali last month, Azahari now heads the list of most-wanted fugitives in Southeast Asia for his role in the Bali bombings and possibly the Aug. 5 bomb attack at the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta.

Several of the university's lecturers have been arrested -- including Wan Min Wan Mat, described as the JI treasurer, who was responsible for raising funds for the Bali operation -- but some like Azahari are still on the run.

Another fugitive wanted for his role in the Bali bombings is Nordin Mohamed Top, a UTM graduate who later became Luqmanul Hakiem principal just before it was raided.

It was a former UTM lecturer, Abdullah Daud, who provided a telling picture of the JI world when he testified before the National Human Rights Commission in June last year.

Abdullah, who has been detained under the Internal Security Act that allows indefinite detention without trial, is one of the few who admitted to the existence of the JI.

He was a member for seven years, underwent military training in Afghanistan, was involved with the Moro National Liberation Front that is fighting for an independent Muslim state in the southern Philippines, and also fought against Christians on the Indonesian island of Ambon.

All is quiet now at the school, shut down by the government early last year, and there is nothing that speaks of its identity as a former terrorist training facility.

The name of the school has even been painted over.

The recent Bali bombing trials in Indonesia have once again put the school under the spotlight and it is clear the reclusive community has had enough of living under the media glare.