Azahari bin Husin, who was killed during a police raid on a terrorist hide-out in the East Java town of Batu, topped wanted lists across Southeast Asia for his bomb-making expertise and his determination to carry out attacks on Western interests in the region.

Known as the "Demolition Man," the bespectacled Malaysian is believed to have been one of five key members of the al-Qaida linked terror group Jemaah Islamiyah, blamed for a series of deadly terror strikes in Indonesia.

Arrested members of the network have said they were motivated in part by anger at US foreign policy in the Muslim world, and that their ultimate goal was to establish an Islamic state across parts of Southeast Asia.

"The group's operation capability will be reduced significantly as of today," said Major General Ansyaad Mbai, a top Indonesian anti-terror official. "But it is still dangerous because this movement is based on ideological and political motives. It cannot be stopped by the arrest and killing of one leader."

Azahari is accused of playing a key planning and operational role in the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, two attacks in Jakarta in 2003 and 2004, as well as last month's restaurant blasts, also on Bali. More than 240 people many of them foreign tourists were killed in all four attacks.

Azahari, along with fellow Malaysian militant Noordin Top, eluded capture for years by renting cheap houses in densely populated areas. Noordin's whereabouts remain unknown, but police say they normally travelled apart.

Azahari, in his 40s, is a native of the southern Malaysian state of Johor. He studied mechanical engineering at Adelaide University in Australia before getting a doctorate in property valuation from Reading University in England in 1990.

He was a university professor before reportedly joining Jemaah Islamiyah. Azahari is known to have received bomb-making training in Mindanao in the southern Philippines in 1999, and advanced training in Afghanistan in 2000.

An elite US-trained police unit raided Azahari's hide out in Batu in east Java Province on Thursday. Officers shot him just seconds before he was able to detonate a suicide belt around his waist. Another militant holed up with managed to blow himself up to avoid capture.

Indonesia authorities have long suspected that he would rather die than be arrested.

Ken Conboy, an Indonesia-based terror expert, said police were hoping to catch him alive.

"This has deprived the authorities from gaining exploitable information with regard to future plans, financing, stockpiled explosives, and new suicide recruits," he said.

Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty said he thought Azahari would have not been much help to investigators anyway.

"I think someone like Azahari ... was unlikely to ever co-operate," he said in Thailand. He said the Indonesian police "were fortunate that no one lost their lives Thursday in that very critical operation."

Australian Prime Minister John Howard said Azahari's death was "good news."

Indonesian police had been after the Adelaide-educated former university lecturer and fellow Malaysian Noordin Top since the first Bali bombings in 2002, in which 88 Australians were among the 202 people slain.

"It doesn't mean that JI (Jemaah Islamiyah) is crippled but it does mean that somebody that is believed to have been behind the two Bali attacks, the Marriott attack and the attack on the Australian Embassy in Jakarta may well have been taken out of the equation. If that is confirmed, then that is a huge advance, but we're going to embroiled in this struggle for years into the future."

Source: China Daily