February 20, 2001: Evidence Suggests Indonesian Military Assisted Al-Qaeda Affiliate with Christmas Eve Bombings

A series of 38 church bombings on Christmas Eve, 2000, killed 19 people in 11 Indonesian cities. The al-Qaeda affiliate Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) is blamed (see December 24-30, 2000). However, in February 2001, the respected Indonesian newsweekly Tempo publishes a cover story suggesting links between the bombings and the Indonesian military, the TNI. The article points out that Edi Sugiarto, who was quickly arrested and confessed to assembling 15 of the bombs used in the town of Medan, has long run a car repair shop in the province of Aceh, where a separatist group named GAM has been fighting for many years. Members of TNI and Indonesia’s special forces, Kopassus, regularly went to his shop for repairs and just to hang out. As a result, GAM claimed he was a TNI lackey and burned down his shop and house in 1997. Phone records also indicate that Sugiarto called Fauzi Hasbi seven times before the bombings. Hasbi is a leader of JI, but Tempo outs him as an Indonesian government mole. In 2005, two years after Hasbi’s death, the Australian television program SBS Dateline will provide additional evidence of Hasbi’s long-time links to the TNI (see 1979-February 22, 2003). Fasbi also called Jacob Tanwijaya, a businessman well connected with the TNI, 35 times. That businessman in turn talked on the phone to Lt. Col. Iwan Prilianto, a Kopassus special forces intelligence officer, over 70 times. However, these potential military links are never investigated and only Sugiarto and other alleged JI figures are arrested and later convicted for a role in the bombings. SBS Dateline will later report that “reputable sources claim [Sugiarto] was so severely tortured before his trial he would have admitted to anything.” [Tempo, 2/20/2001; SBS Dateline, 10/12/2005] Fasbi also made at least one call to another key figure in the bombings. The International Crisis Group, an international think tank, will later comment, “[I]t is hard to avoid the suspicion that someone in the armed forces must have known that at least the Medan part [of the bombings] was in the works…” [International Crisis Group, 12/11/2002]