INDONESIA: Dubbed the "Demolition Man" by Malaysian newspapers, Azahari Husin has been accused by police of being the key figure behind the construction of the bombs which exploded outside the Australian embassy in Jakarta.
He is believed to be Jemaah Islamiah's most expert bombmaker. The regional group is believed to be linked to al-Qaeda. Husin is a former university lecturer and gifted mathematician, who police suspect of designing the Bali and JW Marriott Hotel bombs. He studied in Australia for four years in the late 1970s, when many Malay students were drawn to the cause of political Islam under the influence of the brewing Iranian revolution. Husin returned home to obtain his degree, and at the end of the 1980s went to Reading University in southern England, where he impressed his tutors so much they persuaded him to stay on to complete a doctorate. That was in 1990.
Soon after returning to Malaysia, some ex-students offered him a well-paid job in Indonesia. He still showed little sign of being the strict Muslim he was later to become. Back in Malaysia, two toddlers in tow, he and his wife became lecturers at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia at Skudai in Johor.
His epiphany occurred in the mid-1990s, when he fell under the influence of the late Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Bashir, two exiled Indonesian preachers spouting notions of jihad, or holy war, and accused of being Jemaah's founding fathers.
He went on to train in Afghanistan and the southern Philippines in the late 1990s, developing a passion for making bombs. "He's a real born-again Muslim," said one security official.