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Police closely monitor Syria returnees after IS-linked attack in Medan
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Mobile Brigade (Brimob) personnel guard the North Sumatra Police headquarters following a fatal knife attack carried out by suspected local militants linked to the Islamic State group on Sunday. (Antara/Irsan Mulyadi)
T
he National Police have stepped up the monitoring of hundreds of Indonesian returnees from Syria after it was revealed that one of the two attackers in the fatal stabbing of a policeman at the North Sumatra Police headquarters in Medan had traveled to the war-ravaged Middle Eastern nation in 2013.
“We will intensify our monitoring,” National Police spokesman Insp. Gen. Setyo Wasisto told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.
Setyo said that under current legislation, the police could only monitor the activities of returnees but did not have the authority to make arrests unless a terrorism-related crime had been committed.
“Law No.15/2003 on terrorism doesn't grant [the police] authority [to arrest those returning from war-torn countries such as Syria]. We know that they have been to Syria to wage war but we cannot not do anything except monitor them,” he said.
Read also: Tito suspects JAD terror group behind N. Sumatra police post attacks
Setyo said the National Police hoped that the House of Representatives, which was deliberating an amendment to the law, would add provisions that gave the police's Densus 88 counterterrorism squad more power in making preventive arrests.
On Sunday, at 3 a.m., two attackers, identified as Sawaluddin Pakpahan and Hardi, aka Ardial Ramadhana, sneaked into Checkpoint 3 of the North Sumatra Police headquarters post and stabbed to death a resting police officer and wounded another.
Ardial was shot dead while Sawaluddin was wounded and arrested.
Sawaluddin spent six months in Syria in 2013, a year before the Islamic State (IS) movement announced the establishment of the now shrinking caliphate. (bbs)
