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JAKARTA - A BODY exhumed by the military in the Philippines this week was unlikely to be an Islamic militant wanted over the 2002 Bali bombings, a regional terror expert said in Indonesia on Wednesday.
Philippines military officials said on Tuesday that the body of militant Dulmatin was thought to have been recovered from a shallow grave on the island of Tawi-tawi.
But Sidney Jones, a terrorism expert with the Brussels-based think-tank the International Crisis Group, said she believed that if he were truly dead, sources in Indonesia would have already heard about it.
'We are pretty sure that Dulmatin is not dead, despite the fact that the Philippine military announced about eight times that he is,' she said, referring to repeated erroneous reports he has been captured or killed.
'I think that we would have heard from other sources if Dulmatin had in fact been seriously wounded or killed. He was wounded at one stage, but there's no other reporting coming in from people in Indonesia,' she said.
'I just think we would have heard more if the body that they uncovered is really his,' Mr Jones added, speaking at a panel discussion on terrorism.
Philippines officials said that tissue from the exhumed body will be compared with samples taken from Dulmatin's children to establish if it was him.
Indonesian officials have expressed scepticism that the body was Dulmatin's, though Indonesian police chief Sutanto said on Wednesday that police in the Philippines had asked for Indonesian help to clarify.
'We will work with authorities in the Philippines and will make an effort to check the identity,' he told reporters.
The US government has offered a US$10 million (S$10 million) bounty for Dulmatin, who was once a senior figure in the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) movement and is believed to have been hiding in the Philippines' south for most of the past five years.
He was earlier reported to have been wounded in a clash with government troops in the region on Jan 31.
He is accused of helping JI plan and carry out the 2002 bombings in Bali that left 202 people dead.
Terrorism expert Mr Jones said that Dulmatin's group in the Philippines was 'basically not even considered JI any longer by many of the JI members here in Indonesia'.
JI was previously said to have links with Al-Qaeda, but security analysts now believe the organisation is isolated. -- AFP
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