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JAKARTA - Indonesian counter-terrorism forces killed a man believed to have been one of the masterminds of the 2002 Bali bombings on Tuesday during a raid in the capital Jakarta, police and reports said.
The man was among three people killed in two raids on the city's outskirts.
Police did not disclose the identities of the three, saying "a forensic examination was still being carried out".
But a police source told AFP one was believed to be Dulmatin, a leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) militant group and an Al-Qaeda-trained bomb-making specialist for whom Washington is offering a 10-million-US-dollar bounty.
It is not the first report of his death. In 2008, Philippine military officials said they believed Dulmatin's body had been exhumed on the island of Tawi-tawi.
The security ministry's counter-terrorism chief, Ansyaad Mbai, told AFP that "if it's true that it's him, we will be very grateful that the most wanted terrorist has been killed in Pamulang. It will be a big relief to us."
At a news conference, national police spokesman Edward Aritonang said that one of the three was killed in a gunfight with counter-terrorism police at an Internet cafe in Pamulang city west of the capital.
Witnesses saw a body bag taken from the cafe into an ambulance following the gunfight. In a later raid a few kilometres from the first incident two other people on a motorcycle were shot dead, an AFP photographer witnessed.
Police confirmed that the operation was linked to a counter-terrorism raid in Aceh province in which a militant training facility was discovered. Sixteen suspects have been arrested so far and charged under counter-terrorism laws.
The series of operations comes ahead of a planned visit by US President Barack Obama this month.
Believed to be in his late 30s, Dulmatin is accused of helping JI plan and carry out the Bali bombings, which killed 202 people on the Indonesian resort island, most of them foreign tourists.
JI is a Southeast Asian extremist group inspired by Al-Qaeda. Its ultimate goal is to unite Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore and the southern Philippines into a fundamentalist Islamic state, using terrorist attacks to destabilise existing governments.
The group has carried out more than 50 bombings in Indonesia since April 1999, according to the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, including the 2002 Bali bombings and attacks on the resort island in 2005 that killed 20.
The last such attack killed seven people and two suicide bombers in two luxury hotels in Jakarta last July.
Malaysian terror mastermind Noordin Mohammad Top, killed in September 2009, allegedly organised the attacks as part of his Al-Qaeda-inspired "holy war" on the West. He was falsely reported to have been killed a month earlier by local media.
- AFP/ir
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