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Indonesian court
rejects Muslim militant leader's appeal to be released from
detention
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The
Associated Press
Sun Jul 21, 2:56 AM ET
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Indonesian court
rejects Muslim militant leader's appeal to be released from
detention
JAKARTA, Indonesia - An Indonesian
court rejected an appeal by a Muslim militant leader to be
released from police detention pending his trial on charges of
inciting religious violence, news reports said Sunday.
The Jakarta Post said a court in
Ambon, the capital of the eastern province of Maluku, ruled
Saturday that Jafar Umar Thalib could not be released because a
Jakarta court on July 15 extended his detention by 30 days.
Thalib, head of the paramilitary
group Laskar Jihad, said he would continue to fight the detention
ruling after the court acknowledged that Ambon's head prosecutor
signed the warrant on July 2, two days after he left office.
Barman Zahir, a spokesman for
Indonesia's attorney general in Jakarta, said the flawed warrant
could invalidate the Jakarta court's decision to detain Thalib.
Thalib is currently jailed at the
National Police Headquarters in Jakarta.
He was detained May 4 shortly after
he returned from the Maluku islands, where up to 9,000 people have
been killed in Christian-Muslim fighting.
Police accuse Thalib of inciting a
recent upsurge in violence in the province in a speech delivered
to thousands of his followers on March 26. Two days later,
unidentified masked men stormed a Christian village in the Maluku
capital, killing 13 people.
Thalib urged his supporters to
ignore a peace deal, which had succeded in reducing violence in
the region since it was signed in February.
Vice President Hamzah Haz and other
top officials have visited Thalib, showing the degree of
high-level support that his group enjoys in Indonesia, the world's
most populous Muslim nation. Scores of Muslim organizations have
protested his arrest.
Some analysts say Laskar Jihad has
links to Osama bin Laden ( news
- web
sites)'s al-Qaida terror network. Laskar Jihad denies the
allegations.
Fighting in the Maluku archipelago,
known as the Spice Islands during Dutch colonial times, broke out
in 1999. It increased dramatically in 2000 when thousands of armed
Laskar Jihad fighters joined the conflict.
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