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CANBERRA, Australia?Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono confirmed Wednesday that suspected terror mastermind Dulmatin had been killed in a police raid in Jakarta.
The president, on a three-day visit to Australia, said a raid against militants hiding out in the capital had resulted in the death of the man believed to have been behind the 2002 bombings on the resort island of Bali.
"We can confirm that one of those that were killed was Mr. Dulmatin, one of the top Southeast Asian terrorists that we have been looking for," Yudhoyono said through an interpreter in Canberra.
Dulmatin, the Al-Qaeda-trained bomber thought to have been killed on Tuesday, began his induction into Southeast Asian terrorism at a religious boarding school and went on to mastermind some of the region's most notorious attacks.
Born in Central Java in 1970, Dulmatin sports a moustache and thick dark eyebrows in a photograph posted on the website of the United States' Rewards for Justice program, which has placed a $10-million bounty on his head.
As a young man he dropped out of university and joined a religious boarding school set up by Abu Bakar Bashir, spiritual leader of regional terror network Jemaah Islamiyah, who spent time in jail for supporting terrorist activities in the Indonesian archipelago.
Dulmatin then joined an underground regional cell and in the course of his career underwent training in Afghanistan and accumulated an array of aliases, including Joko Pitoyo, Joko Pitono, Abdul Matin, and Muktarmar.
The event for which he is best remembered is the 2002 Bali bombings, which killed 202 people, most of them foreign tourists, and sent shock waves around the world, coming after the September 11 attacks in the United States the previous year.
Dulmatin is alleged to have helped organize and carry out the Bali attacks.
For Dulmatin's family, who still live in central Java, reports of his death are nothing new.
"We frequently receive the news of Dulmatin's death... but up until now the fact is still unclear," his sibling Azam Ba'afut told the Antara news agency Tuesday.
"We can't believe that Dulmatin was behind all the bombings. But if he's really dead, we must accept it and ask that his body be buried in Pemalang," he added, referring to Dulmatin's hometown.
Jemaah Islamiyah aims to unite Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, and the southern Philippines into a fundamentalist Islamic state, using terrorist attacks to destabilize existing governments.
Following the bombing of Jakarta's JW Marriott hotel in August 2003, Dulmatin fled to the southern Philippines island of Mindanao, another center of Islamic militancy in the region.
"He is an electronics specialist with training in Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, and is a senior figure in the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist organization," US officials said.
