Abu Bakar Bashir (born 17 August 1938) was a leader of Jemaah Islamiyah.
Biography[]
Abu Bakar Bashir was born on 17 August 1938 in Jombang, East Java, Dutch East Indies to a mixed family of Hadhramis and Javanese. He was an Islamic teacher involved with youth organizations, and President Suharto had him arrested due to his support of sharia instead of the government-promoted policy of secularism. Bashir refused to salute the flag of Indonesia as a sign of his opposition to the secular government, and from 1978 to 1982 he was held in extrajudicial detention. Bashir was in exile until the fall of Suharto in 1998, and in 1999 he returned home to become a cleric. He was the ideological godfather of Jemaah Islamiyah, and he later stated that the group did not exist; instead, he claimed that 9/11 was caused by the United States and Israel to justify a war on Islam and that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) carried out the 2002 Bali bombings. In 2002, the USA imprisoned him at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, and he was later turned over to Indonesia.