Report: JI leader planned to bomb Sydney Olympics

SINGAPORE (AFP) – The Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) terrorist organization planned to attack the Sydney Olympic Games but was talked out of it by the group’s Australian leader, intelligence officials were reported saying yesterday.

The decision to target the 2000 Olympics was the brainchild of Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, the suspected JI operations chief, the Straits Times said quoting regional intelligence sources.

"Hambali’s plan for attacking the Olympics was, however, rejected by the JI chief in Australia, Abdul Rahim," the report quoted the sources as saying.

Hambali was said to be "bitterly disappointed" as he had already selected and trained a team for the attack.

One unidentified member was described as an Australian JI member Hambali met at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, and another was a Sydney taxi driver, Kushmir Nesirwan, an Indonesian with Australian permanent residency.

Kushmir was said to have been involved in JI operations in Ambon, the Indonesian city where more than 5,000 people have been killed in clashes between Muslims and Christians since 1999.

The specific Olympic Games attack plans and the reasons for rejecting them were not known, but the report said it showed the degree to which the al-Qaeda-linked JI had entrenched itself within Australia.

"Certainly, the JI was more rooted in the country than the Australian authorities were aware of, or wished to acknowledge," the intelligence sources were quoted as saying.

It was only after the Bali nightclub bombings in October which killed more than 190 people – nearly half of them Australian – that Canberra began to recognize the true extent of JI’s reach, the report said.

In a profile of the JI in Australia, the report said it was set up in 1996 in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney as Mantiqi (district) 4, covering Australia and Indonesia’s Irian Jaya province, now called Papua. Its members include Indonesian permanent residents and Australian citizens who were Caucasians.

The Australian government has denied that Hambali entered the country to establish the JI network, although there have been reports that he went there on at least one occasion.

A more frequent visitor to Australia to meet Australian JI members was Abu Bakar Bashir, the 64-year-old Muslim cleric and so-called JI spiritual leader.