JAKARTA, Indonesia — An audacious attack by suicide bombers in the heart of Indonesia's capital was funded by the Islamic State group, police said Friday, as they seized an ISIS flag from the home of one of the attackers and carried out raids across the country in which one suspected militant was killed.
National police chief Gen. Badrodin Haiti told reporters that Thursday's attack was funded by ISIS through Bahrun Naim, a leader of a Southeast Asian unit affiliated to ISIS called Katibah Nusantara. Bahrun, an Indonesian, spent one year in jail for illegal possession of weapons in 2011, and is now in Syria fighting for the group.
According to the New York Times, Bahrun wrote a recent blog post supporting the Paris attacks in November, and praised the high death toll. The post also encouraged others in Indonesia to study the events of Paris.
PHOTO allegedly showing weapons & parts of explosives used in #JakartaBlasts https://t.co/7RzbMqwNEm (via @KompasTV) pic.twitter.com/D7H3wizLfr— RT (@RT_com) January 14, 2016
Media reports say ISIS had claimed responsibility for the attacks on its Telegram channel, and the group's supporters also circulated a claim of responsibility for the attack on Twitter late Thursday.
The radical group controls territory in Syria and Iraq, and its ambition to create an Islamic caliphate has attracted some 30,000 foreign fighters from around the world, including a few hundred Indonesians and Malaysians.
The ISIS link, if proved, poses a challenge to Indonesian security forces. Until now, the group was known only to have sympathizers with no active cells capable of planning and carrying out a plot such as Thursday's in which five men attacked a Starbucks cafe and a traffic police booth with handmade bombs, guns and suicide belts.
They killed two people, one a Canadian and the other an Indonesian, and injured 20 in the first major attack in Indonesia since 2009. The militants were killed, either by their suicide vests or by police.
A Jakarta traffic cop back on duty at the intersection where five of his colleagues were badly injured yesterday pic.twitter.com/GkVFShG1zt— Adam Harvey (@adharves) January 15, 2016
Additional reporting by Mashable.