JAKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesian authorities said Friday that they had identified one of the attackers responsible for the deadly explosions in Jakarta a day earlier as a former terrorism convict who was released from prison early.
The disclosure came as police beefed up security in government offices, police stations, shopping centers and diplomatic missions across the capital following Thursday’s attack that left two civilians — an Indonesian and a Canadian — and five assailants dead.
One of the assailants was identified as Afif, who was sentenced to seven years in prison on domestic terrorism charges in 2010. The circumstances of his early release were not disclosed.
Photographs showed Afif, dressed in a baseball cap and jeans, with wearing a backpack and shoulder bag, pointing a gun at a crowd at the scene of the attack in Jakarta. Police said the backpack contained explosives and that Afif blew himself up along with another attacker during a shootout with police.
Police spokesman Anton Charliyan said another attacker, whose name was not revealed, was also a former terrorism convict.
Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, was the scene of several major militant attacks by al-Qaida-affiliated groups in the 2000s, but Jakarta had not seen a significant attack in several years.
Authorities said the Thursday attack was directed and financed by the Islamic State, the militant organization based in Iraq and Syria, by an Indonesian living in Syria. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the blasts in online statements, but analysts said the attack caused significantly less damage than other coordinated attacks attributed to the group, such as the November rampage in Paris that left 130 dead.
Authorities named the mastermind of the Jakarta attack as Bahrun Naim, who reports said had been living in the Islamic State-held town of Raqqa. Bahrun praised the Paris attacks in a blog post in November and encouraged militants in Indonesia to carry out similar operations.
