Education indeed

[crit13]

By Jalil Hamid

ULU TIRAM, Malaysia (Reuters) - For the villagers who lived nearby, the parents and children at the Luqmanul Hakiem religious school were outsiders.

Some came from elsewhere in Malaysia while others came from neighbouring Singapore and Indonesia.

They all had one thing in common -- a desire to follow a purer form of Islam.

But some, say police, shared something more -- they took a secret oath of allegiance to Jemaah Islamiah, the shadowy Southeast Asian militant network blamed for the Bali bomb blasts.

"I suspected something was not right at that school," village headman Saad Shamin said in Sungai Redan, his kampung or village on the other side of a hill from the school in the southern Malaysian state of Johor.

The madrassah, or school, was shut down after a police raid in January.

Villagers who work in the nearby plantations and factories have expressed shock at the mention of one familiar name after another in media reports on Southeast Asia's war on terror.

Police investigating the Bali bombings, which killed more than 180 people, most of them Western tourists, say three of the six Indonesian suspects had a link with the school.

The villagers say people from the school, which was also just a few kilometres from one of Malaysia's biggest army camps, didn't mix much.

"I didn't suspect anything, they were just boys coming in here to get their sweets after Friday prayers. It was all very innocent," said Mohamad Rosman, the village shopkeeper.

"In hindsight, I should have been suspicious because I noticed the way they prayed was a bit foreign, but it came as a shock when I read in the papers about the teachers' arrest," he said, referring to detentions after the school was closed.

The villagers recall people as being polite and devout. The headman saw it as a school fostering anti-government sentiment, not militants dreaming of an Islamic state across the region.

Set at the end of an isolated road through a palm oil estate, the school was established a decade ago by Indonesian preacher Abdullah Sungkar -- the man police credit with secretly founding and leading Jemaah Islamiah until his death in 1999.

Police say Abu Bakar Bashir took over the leadership of the network. Bashir, who is under arrest in Jakarta for conspiracy to bomb churches and assassinate President Megawati Sukarnoputri before she took power last year, denies any link with the network or any wrongdoing of any kind.

PREACHERS IN EXILE

Both Abdullah and Bashir fled to Malaysia in the mid-1980s to escape then Indonesian president Suharto's police after being linked with unrest in central Java. They returned home after the dictator's fall in 1998.

During their years in Malaysia, police say Abdullah based himself in Johor, and Bashir preached around Klang, a west coast port less than an hours' drive from the capital Kuala Lumpur.

With a million or more migrant Indonesians on Malaysia's west coast, the preachers found a small dedicated following.

At its peak in the mid-1990s, villagers say there were 500 pupils attending the Luqmanul Hakiem madrassah.

Today, there are only lizards and insects in the dormitories of the young boys and girls. The schoolgates are padlocked. No one prays at the mosque.

When Singapore announced it had cracked a cell planning attacks on U.S. targets last December, police learned a number of its members sent their children to the school just across the causeway.

Police swooped days later, arresting the principal, among others, but they say several suspected Jemaah Islamiah operatives had already skipped the country.

Villagers remember one man, named Amrozi, visiting the school where his brother Mukhlas was a preacher.

Amrozi is now under arrest in Indonesia for the Bali attack.

"We called him Rozi," said one of the few villagers to have attended the school. "His brother was a very quiet man, very patient and polite, a good teacher. He held Malaysian identity papers and married a Malay girl."

Locals also recall seeing the chubby-faced suspect called Idris, who police say studied there too.

There are conflicting reports whether Imam Samudra, one of the suspected planners of the Bali attack, was in Johor.

Malaysian police know he was active in Klang. Hambali, the man police describe as the main link between the Southeast Asian group and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, was also in and around Klang, when he wasn't visiting Pakistan and Afghanistan.

BORN-AGAIN ZEALOTS

While all the Bali suspects are Indonesian, Malaysian police are hunting several local militants, and they half expect one of their own nationals to be cited in the Bali probe.

Academics from a nearby university appear on wanted lists and police say at least one is a skilled bombmaker who has toured the conflict zones of Afghanistan and the southern Philippines.

Police say the head of the Johor cell, Wan Win Wan Mat, was a local co-founder of the school. They arrested him returning from southern Thailand in late September.

"The school was where most Jemaah Islamiah elements in Johor congregated," a senior officer with the Malaysian security forces told Reuters, saying not everyone at the school was hard core.

All were drawn by the Indonesian preachers' promise of a purer form of Islam, but the officer said only some took the secret oath of allegiance to the Jemaah Islamiah.

Investigations suggest the school aimed to provide a community apart, where pupils were instructed in the "salaf", the teachings of the Prophet Mohammad and his companions in the early centuries of Islam. Strict followers of these teachings regard everything that came after as deviant.

That poor, ill-educated men should be recruited as foot soldiers came as no surprise, but revelations that academics, men of science, and businessmen were won over took Malaysians by surprise.

Unlike Indonesia, Malaysia has made great strides to eliminate poverty. It has a record of stability and religious tolerance. The government, led by Muslim Malays, pursues affirmative action to offset alienation or oppression.

Ahmad Azam Abdul Rahman, president of the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia, one of the country's largest Islamic organisations, describes middle-class members of Jemaah Islamiah as born-again Muslims. "They have the sophistication but spiritually they feel very low," he says.

Apart from the villager who attended the school and asked to remain anonymous, no one else connected with Luqmanul Hakiem was around to comment.

The villager accused authorities and the media of distortion.

"I'm shocked and surprised... they are making things up," he told Reuters. "We were not taught to hate (Malaysian Prime Minister) Mahathir (Mohamad). It was a very ordinary religious school, just like many others."

I'm sure it was a very ordinary school. I have NO doubt.