Indonesia has been warned by a foreign intelligence agency that an assassination squad targeting Westerners has slipped into the country, the Indonesian chief of police has said.
General Da'i Bachtiar said police had been searching for the squad but had so far come up empty-handed.
"There is intelligence information from overseas stemming from a number of people detained in the Philippines," he said when asked for a response to reports in the Wall Street Journaland the Far Eastern Economic Reviewmagazine that regional militant network Jemaah Islamiah had sent an assassination squad to Indonesia.
He said that Indonesia had porous borders and if militants entered illegally they would be very hard to find.
"We have been working to search for them, but up until now we haven't found them," Bachtiar told reporters.
"The intelligence information was a warning for us to anticipate this, even though domestic analysis does not obtain such information," he said without naming the agency that had provided the tip-off.
Western security agencies fear Jemaah Islamiah could be changing tactics from bombing to targeted killings of Westerners, similar to al Qaeda's strategy in Saudi Arabia where attacks are hitting the economy and driving an exodus of foreign workers.
Indonesia's foreign ministry said today that Jakarta was taking all necessary measures to prevent terror attacks.
"Nowadays, no single government, including Indonesia and other governments, can have a 100 percent guarantee of security on everything," said foreign ministry spokesman Marty Natalegawa.
"At the same time, the Indonesian government would be very careful to ensure that we take all the necessary precautions to avoid such negative scenarios," he said, referring to the reports about an assassination squad.
His comments came after Australia said it was investigating reports that Jemaah Islamiah had sent a squad trained in assassination techniques to target Australians, Americans, Britons and other Westerners in Indonesia. The reports said those country's ambassadors were key targets.