Images of leading Islamic militant Noordin Mohammad Top are seen in a wanted poster at a police station in Malang, East Java August 8, 2009. [Agencies]
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Images of leading Islamic militant Noordin Mohammad Top are seen in a wanted poster at a police station in Malang, East Java August 8, 2009. [Agencies]
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JAKARTA/ISLAMABAD: DNA tests on the body of a man shot by Indonesian security forces during a raid targeting Islamic militant Noordin Mohammad Top are to take at least a week as some analysts questioned whether police had got their man.
Meanwhile, in Islamabad, senior Taliban commanders denied their leader was killed in a CIA missile strike in Pakistan while conflicting reports emerged of a clash between rival factions during a meeting to choose a successor.
Interior Minister Rahman Malik said late on Saturday that authorities received information about a fight breaking out during a meeting, or shura, between groups led by Hakimullah - one of the Taliban's most powerful commanders - and Waliur Rehman.
"We had the information that one of them is dead. So the information is being verified. We need to see the dead bodies, we need to do some DNA, we need to have something solid," Malik told local television.
But another senior government official said there were reports of a clash among Taliban guards at a meeting on Saturday evening and indications some people had been wounded, but there was no credible information to suggest any of the Taliban leaders were among them.
The evidence is "pretty conclusive" that Mehsud is dead, US national security advisor Jim Jones said Sunday.
"We think so. We put it in the 90 percent category," Jones told NBC's "Meet the Press." He said that Pakistan had confirmed the death.
Top Wanted in Hotel Case
Malaysian-born Top, 40, is a prime suspect in last month's near simultaneous suicide attacks on Jakarta's JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels which killed nine people and wounded 53.
A militant police believe was Top was shot dead on Saturday after an 18-hour siege by heavily armed members of Indonesia's anti-terrorism unit of a house surrounded by rice and tobacco fields in Central Java.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has vowed to track down the hotel bombers and if Top has been killed it would be major coup for security forces and could reduce the chance of further attacks.
"I think now more than ever we really have to wait and see when the police identify the body," said Sidney Jones, a Jakarta-based expert on Islamist militants at the International Crisis Group. "I don't think anybody has a good idea of who it might be.