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JAKARTA - Indonesian police said Thursday they had cracked a terrorist cell linked to some of the region's most wanted fugitives after the arrest of 10 suspects with a cache of powerful homemade bombs.
Police said the cell was connected to Malaysian extremist Noordin Mohammad Top, a hardline leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) Islamist group who is wanted for allegedly masterminding the 2002 Bali attacks.
One of them was a bombmaker who reportedly met Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and is associated with Mas Selamat bin Kastari, the suspected leader of JI's Singapore branch who escaped from prison there on February 27.
They were arrested earlier this week in Palembang, the capital of South Sumatra province, where US and Australian-trained anti-terror police also found a cache of more than 20 bombs hidden in the attic of a rented house.
"In Palembang we have arrested members of a terrorist network who were detained by Special Detachment 88," police spokesman Abu Bakar Nataprawira told reporters, referring to the anti-terror squad.
"There is a relation between the Palembang group and the Central Java group which means there is a relation between them and Noordin Top," he said.
Top is seen as a key leader of the most radical wing of JI, which has staged a series of bloody attacks in Indonesia and the Philippines including the Bali nightclub bombings and the 2003 Marriott hotel bombing in Jakarta.
More than 200 people, mostly foreign tourists, died in the Bali attacks, while 12 were killed in the Marriott bombing.
Police did not confirm that the bomb expert linked to Mas Selamat was a Singaporean, but the government in the city state said one of its citizens was among the group rounded up in Sumatra.
The Kompas daily said the suspect, identified by police only as MH, 35, had met Osama several times and had received training in Afghanistan.
He is said to have been a student of JI bombmaker Azahari Husin, who was killed in 2005.
"The suspect gave training in assembling bombs to people in Palembang related to terrorist acts in Indonesia," Nataprawira said, adding that he was arrested on Saturday.
The arrest of MH led to the detention of nine other suspects in Palembang and the raid on the house on Tuesday, where police discovered the bombs cache.
Seven powerful "tupperware bombs" and 20 smaller pipe bombs were found in the attic of the rented house, along with bomb-making chemicals and weapons.
Sixteen of the bombs were reportedly primed to explode.
The group's plans were not revealed but police said several of the suspects had been been involved in the attempted murder of a Christian priest in West Java in 2005.
Kompas reported that MH had confessed to planning an attack on a tourist destination on Sumatra on the orders of an unidentified leader, but this was not confirmed by police.
The Singapore government accuses Mas Selamat of plotting to hijack a plane in order to crash it into Singapore's Changi Airport in 2001.
He was never charged, but was being held under a law that allows for detention without trial when he escaped through a toilet window in a detention centre in February.
Nine of the suspects were transferred from Sumatra to Jakarta amid tight security earlier Thursday. An AFP reporter saw the men -- wearing balaclavas, blindfolds and handcuffs -- being transferred onto police buses.
One wore a black T-shirt with a logo that said "Suicide."
They were escorted by masked and heavily armed plain-clothes officers to a police headquarters on the southern outskirts of the city.
One of the men was still being held in Palembang, police said. - AFP/ir
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