By JAKARTA, INDONESIA
Malaysian terror leader Azahari bin Husin was believed to have been killed Wednesday in a shootout with police, a top Indonesian investigator said.
Gorries Mere, the national detective deputy chief, told The Associated Press that Azahari was thought to have been killed in a police raid on a suspected terror hide-out in Malang, a small town south of Indonesia's second largest city of Surabaya.
Witnesses told SCTV they heard two explosions and gunfire before police moved in on the village that was housing suspected terrorists.
Thought to be one of the top bomb-makers in the world Azahari Husin is a former professor of statistics who studied in Great Britain and Australia. Allegedly trained in Afghanistan and the Phillipines, Azahari is a member of Jemaah Islamiah (JI), an al-Qaida-affiliated terror network that espouses the creation of a fundamentalist Muslim country in Southeast Asia.
Husin is suspected of designing the bombs that took out the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in August of 2003, as well as the 2002 Bali bomb that killed more than 200.