Jakarta Police Confirm Four Assailants Behind Sarinah Attack
Jakarta. After much confusion, police in Jakarta have confirmed there were only four attackers behind Thursday's attack with one civilian victim misidentified as a militant.
Police initially alleged Sugito, a 43-year-old killed in the attack, was part of the terrorist plot, but have since concluded he is a civilian casualty.
“It is confirmed that Sugito was merely a civilian. He was a courier in Karawang [West Java] and not a suspected perpetrator.” Jakarta Police spokesman Sr. Comr. M. Iqbal said on Sunday, as quoted by the state-run news agency Antara.
The revelation brings the civilian death toll from the attacks to four.
The most recent victim Rais Karna, a 37-year-old Bangkok Bank office employee, died Saturday evening at the Abdi Waluyo Hospital in Central Jakarta where he had been in a coma after being shot in the head by an attacker.
The other two victims, Rico Hermawan and Canadian national Amel Quali Taher, were both killed instantly.
National Police chief Gen. Badrodin Haiti on Saturday named the suicide bombers as Dian Juni Kurniadi and Ahmad Muhazab Saron. Two other attackers who were gunned down by police have been identified as Afif, who was also known as Sunakim or Sunardi, and Marwan, a.k.a. Muhammad Ali.
The latter two have a history of terrorist activity — Afif was sentenced to seven year imprisonment in 2010 for participating in a militant training camp run in the highland jungles of Aceh, but was released on parole in 2013. Marwan, meanwhile, was alleged to have been involved in a string of deadly armed bank robberies in North Sumatra, ostensibly to raise funds for the camp.
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