JAKARTA: Indonesia will deploy some 180,000 security personnel ahead of the Christmas and New Year holidays, authorities said Friday, following the arrests of more than a dozen suspected militants in the world’s biggest Muslim-majority country. Thirteen suspected militants were arrested in separate, pre-emptive raids across the Southeast Asian nation earlier this month. Many of the suspects were proven to have links to the Islamic State group or had fought in Syria. About 70,000 people from other government agencies and civil society groups – including the country’s largest Islamic youth organisation – would assist security personnel, Sitompul said. In 2002, a bomb in a Bali nightclub killed over 200 people while, more recently, a suicide bombing and gun attack claimed by IS in the capital Jakarta killed eight people in January 2016.

Source: New Strait Times December 22, 2017 08:26 UTC