About An Indonesian Terror Group

From PJ Media:

Indonesian Terror Group, Close Zawahiri Ally Previously Plotted Regional Hijackings

WASHINGTON — An Indonesian terrorist organization that a senior defense official said this week posed a “serious transnational threat” has previously been caught planning hijackings in the region where Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared.

U.S. military assets participating in the search and recovery efforts confirmed they were asked to relocate to the west side of Indonesia in the Indian Ocean as pings indicated the plane turned away from its route to China and turned back over the Malaysian peninsula. ABC News also reported Thursday that the data-reporting system on the flight shut down before the transponder, from 1:07 a.m.to 1:21 a.m., raising suspicions that the plane was at the hands of someone nefarious.

Jemaah Islamiyah has long had designs on roping Malaysia and the Philippines into an Islamist state along with Indonesia, and was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. government after the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing. The group has traditionally used Malaysia for fundraising and as a home base for trainees fresh from the Af-Pak region.

JI plotter Mas Selamat Kastari, who escaped from custody in Singapore in 2008 and was recaptured in Malaysia the following year, was accused of orchestrating a plot earlier in the decade to hijack a plane out of Bangkok’s airport and crash it into Singapore’s airport.

Jemaah Islamiyah had been considered a shadow of its former self in recent years, but the terror group’s name has been occasionally dropped on Capitol Hill as a jihadi movement getting a new lease on life in a post-Osama world.

“Indonesians are the first — are for the first time going overseas to fight, not just to train, which has given rise to concerns that this conflict may breathe new life into the group Jemaah Islamiyah, which analysts previously considered to be moribund,” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a Syria hearing last week.

[...]

Jemaah Islamiyah was working with Osama bin-Laden to launch a coordinated strike on 9/11/01 that would hijack and crash planes at the same time as the attacks on the U.S. The Gitmo document says bin Laden found this too difficult to synchronize so he dropped the southeast Asian part of the plan; operatives involved had been mapping out locations of U.S. carriers in the area and staying in Kuala Lumpur during parts of the plotting.

As far back as 1995, Hambali planned to bomb 11 U.S. airliners in southeast Asia. He also explored biological weapons programs and met with current al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri about bioweapons in Kandahar in 2001.

In 2006, Zawahiri released a video announcing that Jemaah Islamiyah and al-Qaeda were, from that point forward, “one line” as strategic and ideological partners facing a mutual enemy.

Read the entire article HERE.