Leaderless, terror group still potent

To date, Hambali's biggest attack was the bombing of two Bali nightclubs last October, which killed more than 200 people. It followed a directive he gave to senior Jemaah Islamiyah leaders at a meeting in Bangkok in February 2002. [Editor's note: The original version of this article gave the wrong date for a meeting between Hambali and senior Jemaah Islamiyah leaders in Bangkok.]

Mukhlas, the field coordinator for the Bali attack, attended that meeting and is now in Indonesian custody. He has told interrogators that Hambali called for the group to strike out at soft targets where Westerners were known to gather, in part because of his frustration over failed attempts to bomb the US Embassy in Singapore and also in anger over the US invasion of Afghanistan, where many of his friends were coming to grief.

Indonesian police say the suicide car-bombing of Jakarta's Marriott Hotel earlier this month, which killed 12, was another result of Hambali's directive to hit soft, Western targets, even though all but one of the dead were Indonesian.

Indonesian National Police Chief Da'i Bachtiar told reporters that four suspects in the Marriott attack have been captured in the past week, and that a number of men are being sought in the attack. "We won't announce anything about them now, because it will help them escape," he said.

Though Hambali is out of circulation, many of the men who attended that Bangkok meeting remain at large, perhaps chief among them being Azahari Husin, a former professor from the Malaysian Technological University who was been on the run since early 2001.

Mr. Azahari, who has a degree in statistical modeling from England's Reading University, has been described by captured militants as one of the JI's principal technical experts. Indonesian investigators say Azahari wrote a bombmaking manual for the group, and also helped build the car-bomb the group used in Bali.

"We believe he's a likely future leader of JI," says a regional intelligence official.

To be sure, experts on the organization say it will be difficult for any one JI member to fill his shoes.

"They have people who have some of his skills, but no one with all of them," says Mr. Abuza of Simmons College. "I can't think of anybody who will have his kind of charisma and command the respect that he did."

Hambali's respect among militants stems from his jihadi odyssey, which began nearly 20 years ago when he left the lush hills of West Java, his home province, for Afghanistan. When he left, he discarded his given name - Encep Nurjaman. Though he was determined to fight in the jihad, his true calling appeared to organizing and financing other would-be fighters.

Regional intelligence analysts say he came to serve as a coordinator for the Southeast Asian militants pouring through Peshawar, Pakistan, to join what was universally seen in the Islamic world as a just war.

In that respect his career paralleled, albeit in a lesser way, that of Osama bin Laden, who was then working with Saudi, US, and Pakistani intelligence to help Middle Eastern fighters join the war.

Indeed, Hambali and Mr. bin Laden became friendly in the 1980s, and when Al Qaeda was recast in the early 1990s, Hambali seems to have been assigned the key role of expanding its reach into his homeland.

To many investigators he served as a sort of "baby bin Laden," providing the organization skills and inspiration, while encouraging Al Qaeda "franchises" to plan and execute attacks ontheirown.

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