JAKARTA, Sept. 27 (Xinhua) -- Indonesia launched on Wednesday a guidance to detect and cut down transfer of funds to finance terror activities of Islamic State (IS)-linked groups, contributing to regional and global fights against terrorism.
Head of Indonesia's government antiterrorism desk (BNPT) Suhardi Alius said the guidance, which is formed in a book, would lead Indonesian institutions and agencies tasked to combat terrorism in composing and implementing policies to trace and cut the fund transfers for terrorism activities.
The book showed the map of terror group funding network as well as the IS Foreign Terrorist Fighters (FTF) figures in Indonesia.
"The book contains documents aimed at improving awareness of institutions and agencies over the illicit fund transfers and how to trace and cut them. It also indicates the risk of the fund transfers to regional and global security," Suhardi said in the book launching event held here.
He added that Indonesia sees increasing fund transfers activities for IS-linked groups in the country since 2014, indicating that threat of terror attacks carried out by the groups remained credible.
"Those fund transfers were mostly used to acquire weapons, explosive materials, finance the mobility of their militants related to their assignments and terror group network development," Suhardi added.
Speaking in the same occasion, head of Financial Transactions Reporting and Analysis Center (PPATK) Kiagus Ahmad Badaruddin said that trend of fund raising among IS-linked groups in Indonesia has changed from fund transfers to cash donations that gives more challenges for the related agencies to trace them down.
"But somehow we finally found their fund raising pattern. Those funds were eventually heading to a bank account. We also put this kind of fund raising profile in the book," Kiagus said.
IS-linked groups operating in Indonesia were identified to have close connections with IS militants in Southern Philippines and in Syria from the evidences obtained by Indonesian authorities and results of interrogations against the arrested ones.
They have carried out several terror attacks in the country in the past several months with the largest one took place in May in an East Jakarta bus terminal that killed three police and two perpetrators, injured dozens of civilians.
