Indonesia police arrest mosque bombing suspect

(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - The 31-year-old man was one of five on a wanted list connected to the bombing in Cirebon, around 200 kilometres east of Jakarta, which wounded dozens, six of them seriously.

National police spokesman Boy Rafli Amar said the man, named Heru Komarudin, was arrested from central Jakarta in the early hours of Saturday morning.

An anonymous source from Detatchment 88, an elite counter-terrorism police unit currently questioning Komarudin, told AFP that at least one other suspect had been arrested in Bekasi on the outskirts of Jakarta.

"We will make an official statement later today," he said.

On April 15, Mohammed Syarif, 32, detonated explosives strapped to his body at a mosque within a police station during a long Friday prayer service.

The dozens wounded in the explosion -- who were mostly policemen, including the Cirebon police chief -- were found with nails, nuts and bolts lodged in their bodies.

Another suspect on the same wanted list, Achmad Yosepa Hayat, executed an almost identical attack on a church in the city of Solo, central Java, on September 25, injuring dozens of others with a similar explosive.

The Cirebon attack was the first suicide bombing inside a mosque in the world's largest Muslim-majority nation of 240 million people.

The attack highlighted a shift from larger organised terror networks, which have been weakened by Detatchment 88's long bloody crackdown, to smaller connected terror cells that execute lower-impact attacks.

The attack also exposed Cirebon as a new hotbed for terrorism.

Indonesia has struggled to deal with the threat of homegrown Islamist militants who oppose the country's secular, democratic system and want to create a caliphate across much of Southeast Asia.

A series of bombings in the past decade have been blamed on regional terror network Jemaah Islamiyah, including the 2002 Bali bombings which killed 202 people.

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