A suicide bomber detonated a car bomb outside the lobby of the JW Marriott Jakarta hotel on 5 August 2003, killing 12 people and injuring 150.

Two weeks prior to the bombing, there was a tip call to senior Indonesian police officers from a militant captured during a raid in Semarang that two carloads of bomb-making materials were heading to the capital, Jakarta.

[2] A Toyota Kijang, bought on 20 July 2003, from an Indonesian businessman for 25.75 million rupiah was loaded with explosives and driven through the taxi stand in front of the JW Marriott Jakarta.

[8] Six days after the bombing, on August 11 al-Qaeda claimed responsibility, via the Arab media Al Jazeera, and singled out Australia for special attention.

He also claimed that the bombers were linked to a group of people arrested in the eastern Indonesian town of Semarang during July 2004 and are alleged to be members of Jemaah Islamiah.

Noordin had been part of the team that carried out the Christmas Eve bombings which was led by Hambali and included Imam Samudra and many of the other 2002 Bali bombers.

In January 2003, Muhammad Rais, Noordin and Azahari Husin moved to Bengkulu, where a group of JI members lived, including Asmar Latin Sani, who became the JW Marriott suicide bomber.

The next stages of the operation took place in February 2003 when the explosives were transported from Dumai to Bengkulu via Pekanbaru, Azahari secured the detonators with a new team member, Masrizal bin Ali Umar.

After the explosives safely reached Bengkulu as unaccompanied baggage on an intercity bus, they were stored at the house of Sardona Siliwangi, another Ngruki student and JI member.

At the time, Sardona, who was working with Asmar Latin Sani, opened a bank account in March 2003 to facilitate financial transactions for Noordin.

Around this time a pamphlet was circulating in jihadist groups that was a translation from Arabic into Indonesian of an article that first appeared in the al-Qaeda on-line magazine Sawt al-Jihad.

You'll find the same thing if you go to Morocco, where they had the attack in Casablanca; in Turkey, Istanbul, and so forth.It was the simultaneous presence at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan by militants from across South East Asia that facilitated many of the personal relationships that exist between JI and members of other violent Islamist groups.

These include the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a secessionist movement fighting for a Muslim homeland in the southern Philippines, as well as several other Indonesian, Malaysian and Thai groups.

The weight of evidence suggests that although some JI personnel might be inspired by the larger global mystique of figures such as Osama bin Laden, the South East Asian group remains operationally and organisationally distinct.