Islamic State terrorist leader sentenced to death in Indonesia

Indonesian court sentences Aman Abdurrahman for inciting terrorist acts, including one in Jakarta in 2016.

An Indonesian court sentenced a radical cleric to death for inciting followers to commit terrorist acts, including the first Islamic State-linked attack in Southeast Asia.

Aman Abdurrahman, who police and prosecutors say is a leading Islamic State ideologue in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, knelt in prostration and touched his forehead to the ground as the sentence was announced.

A lawyer for Abdurrahman said his client didn’t want to appeal the decision.

Abdurrahman is the spiritual leader of a terrorist group that has been linked to multiple attacks in Indonesia, including a gun-and-bombs attack at a Starbucks in downtown Jakarta in January 2016, the first attack in Southeast Asia explicitly linked to Syria-based Islamic State.

In May, two men who police said were associated with Abdurrahman’s group led their wives and children in suicide bombings at churches and a police station in Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city. The bombings were the first in the country to involve women and children.

Police and U.S. authorities say that despite his incarceration, Abdurrahman has been a link for Islamic State in Indonesia, which has the world’s fourth-largest population. They say he served as a translator of the group’s texts and recruiting followers to fight in the Middle East.

Abdurrahman has spent much of the past 14 years in jail, first on bomb-making charges, then for helping organize a militant training camp on the island of Sumatra and most recently on the charge of inciting attacks. The U.S. has called him the de facto leader of Islamic State supporters in Indonesia and declared him a “specially designated global terrorist,” despite his being in a maximum-security prison.

Source: WSJ