BATU (Indonesia), Nov 10: Indonesian police on Thursday confirmed one of Southeast Asia’s most wanted militants had been killed during a gunbattle with police, saying he tried to blow himself up but failed to detonate a bomb in time.

National police chief General Sutanto said fingerprint tests proved Azahari Husin was one of two militants killed in the town of Batu in East Java province on Wednesday. Azahari was either shot dead or killed when a fellow militant exploded a bomb.

Indonesia, Australia, Malaysia and security experts welcomed the death of Azahari, a master bombmaker blamed for a string of attacks in recent years, but some cautioned it would not eliminate the threat of radical violence in the region.

“The identification of the suspect at the crime scene according to the fingerprint data was identical to Azahari,” Sutanto told reporters in Batu.

“The condition of Azahari’s corpse is that it was severed around the legs and torso. He was not able to reach the button (of a bomb) because officers shot him first, but the other one was able to commit a suicide bombing.”

That made it hard to determine what actually killed Azahari, said Sutanto, adding police found 30 bombs inside the house where he had holed up.

Dubbed the ‘demolition man’ by newspapers in his native Malaysia, Azahari was the suspected brains behind several bomb attacks on western targets in Indonesia and the top bomb maker in Jemaah Islamiah, a network linked to Al Qaeda.

Authorities say the electronics expert designed and supervised the making of the car bomb that caused the most damage in 2002 attacks on the resort island of Bali which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.

Ansyaad Mbai, who heads Indonesia’s anti-terrorist coordinating board, said it was too early to declare victory.

Jemaah Islamiah would not be crippled by Azahari’s death, but it would be a major step in the war on terrorism, said the Australian prime minister .

“It is a huge advance, but we are going to be embroiled in this struggle for years,” he said.—Reuters