'€œFrankly speaking, based on our operation in monitoring groups that support IS [the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria], we have not found a single piece of information suggestive that there is any plan to attack Jakarta or surrounding areas,'€ he said in a meeting with foreign mission representatives at the Jakarta headquarters in South Jakarta on Wednesday.

He said that the city had several instances of attacks recently, but the culprits were not linked to any terrorist groups nor were the attacks conducted to satisfy a particular ideology.

'€œThey [the attacks] were economically driven rather than ideologically driven,'€ he said.

He cited a grenade explosion incident in Duren Sawit, East Jakarta, on Monday as an example of such an economically-driven attack because the target was a privately-owned enterprise.

'€œWe strongly believe that this attack had nothing to do with terrorism because the target was not religiously legitimate,'€ he explained.

Early on Monday, a grenade exploded outside an office building in Duren Sawit and injured a security officer in the building. The Jakarta Police are currently investigating the case and the perpetrator behind the incident, but have said that business competition might be the motivation behind the blast.

Tito went on to say that the bomb explosion incident at Mall Alam Sutera in Tangerang, Banten, last month also had nothing to do with terrorism.

'€œWe have arrested the guy blasting the bomb and the motive was purely based on economic welfare,'€ he said.

In his presentation, Tito highlighted several hardline Islamic groups, such as the notorious Jamaah Islamiyah (JI) and the Indonesian Islamic State (NII), as threatening national security, but added that the power of both groups had been limited by their own ideological differences.

'€œLuckily, these groups are ideologically divided,'€ he said. '€œJI [whose leader Abubakar Ba'€™asyir has declared his support for IS] wants to establish a caliphate [one single government of the Islamic world] while the NII wants to Indonesia top be ruled by Islamic principles.'€

According to Tito, many JI followers will likely refrain from conducting terrorism in Indonesia because they consider Indonesia as an abode of peace not an abode of war, where jihad is only allowed in accordance with the Islamic teaching.

He said JI followers, instead, had been flying to the Middle East to perform jihad because they consider the war-torn region as an abode of war. '€œMiddle East is now a legitimate ground [for JI followers] to perform jihad.'€

Tito said that, based on National Police data, the number of Indonesian citizens who had joined IS had reached a total of 384 people and 54 of these had already, reportedly, been killed.

'€œOn the other hand, NII followers have been attacking government officials [as well as police and military offices],'€ he said, adding that the attacks have been made based on the accusation that the government had not applied Islamic principles in running the country.

Meanwhile, French Ambassador to Indonesia Corrine Breuze, who attended the meeting, said that following the Paris attacks, France had increased security measures at its borders to prevent similar incidents from happening again.

She said that France was now investigating the perpetrators, some of whom were Muslims, but would not take any discriminatory action against Muslim people within the country'€™s general population.

'€œI would like to say to Indonesians and to Muslim countries that there is no discrimination in France. France is not targeting the Muslim population and French people are not targeting Islam. 10 percent of our citizens are Muslims. It must be clear that our target is terrorism,'€ she said. (saf)

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