Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

JEMAAH ISLAMIYAH • 333vember 1997 Tsutomu Shirosaki was convicted in U.S. federal courtfor the 14 May 1986 rocket attack on the U.S. embassy compound inJakarta, Indonesia. The JRA leader, Fusako Shigenobu, was arrestedin Takatsuki, Japan, on 8 November 2000 following a 31-year searchfor her, although a few other JRA members remained at large. InFebruary 2006 Shigenobu was sentenced to serve a 20-year prisonterm for her role in the 1974 hostage seizure in the Netherlands. InApril 2001 Shigenobu announced that the JRA was disbanding. Subsequently,in October 2001 the JRA was removed from the U.S. StateDepartment’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.JEMAAH ISLAMIYAH (JI). This is an Islamic fundamentalistgroup founded in 1993 dedicated to the creation of a Pan-Islamicstate embracing Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the southern Philippines,and Singapore and that is included in the UN Security CouncilResolution 1267 committee list of terrorist organizations linked to alQa’eda and the Taliban. The JI also has ties to the Moro IslamicLiberation Front and the Abu Sayyaf group, both Islamic fundamentalistgroups active in the Philippines. The JI has around 900members and is known to have been involved in at least five majorincidents causing at least 261 fatalities and at least 699 injuries.The JI was founded by two Indonesian Muslim clerics, Abu BakarBashir and Abdullah Sungkar, who established a traditional Islamicboarding school named Pondok Ngruki in Solo, Indonesia in 1973.The two men were originally affiliated with the Dar ul Islam group, anonviolent Islamic fundamentalist group similar to Egypt’s MuslimBrotherhood. After being forced to flee to Malaysia in 1982 duringthe Suharto regime’s frequent crackdowns on suspected Muslimmilitants, the two men founded the JI with the intention of using itas an insurgent movement to fight the secularist Suharto regime andto create a Pan-Islamic state in Southeast Asia. Sungkar reportedlyjoined forces with al Qa’eda in Afghanistan, where another future JIleader, Riduan Isamuddin, also known as Hanbali, fought with Mujahideenforces from 1987 to 1990 and who also had contact withOsama bin Laden. Hanbali would become al Qa’eda’s main contactand operations manager for such attacks as the failed Operation Bojinkaairlines plot by the Abu Sayyaf Group in the Philippines andthe Bali bombings of October 2002. In January 2000 while in Malaysia,Hanbali also contacted Nawaf al Hamzi and Khalid al Midhar,