Asia terror chief believed killed in Indonesia
(AFP)
Updated: 2005-11-10 09:16

Sutanto said the shootout erupted when the men refused to surrender to police after they encircled their modest house.

"They shot first and it hit a police officer who was wounded," he said, adding that after the shootout there were 11 blasts, "the last one being quite strong."

"The last one appears to have been a suicide. They (the three) all died."

He said the bodies remained in the house and police would not enter until any explosives remaining there were detonated by a bomb squad.

Karni Ilyas, an Indonesian journalist who said he accompanied a police anti-terror unit as it raided Azahari's house, told ANTV channel that Azahari was dead.

"The body was in pieces but his face could still be recognised by two members of the anti-terrorist unit from Jakarta," Ilyas said.

An undated police handout photo shows Malaysian Azahari bin Husin.[Reuters/file]

Azahari and his Malaysian compatriot Noordin Mohammad Top are wanted for key roles in the October 2002 attacks on Bali nightclubs that left 202 people dead, as well as last month's triple suicide attack and several other deadly blasts.

Azahari, in his late forties, studied in Australia for four years in the late 1970s and became a lecturer at Malaysia's University of Technology before dropping out of sight during a crackdown on Islamic militants in 2001.

Azahari left his wife with the words that he had the greater cause of God to serve, security sources say, speculating that his move to radical Islam could have been prompted by his wife developing throat cancer in the early 1990s.

While some reports of the previously shadowy Azahari say he trained in bomb-making in Afghanistan, he is believed to have honed his skills with Muslim separatists in Mindanao in the southern Philippines in 1999.

Security officials say he is the author of the JI bomb manual, and that he was widely named as a possible successor to JI operations chief Hambali, an Indonesian arrested in Thailand in 2003 and now in US custody.

Azahari and Noordin narrowly escaped a police dragnet in 2003 in the Indonesian city of Bandung on Java island, and Indonesian newspapers at the time criticised the police for their failure to capture them.