Indonesian police today confirmed one of Southeast Asia's most wanted militants had been killed during a gunbattle with police.
National police chief General Sutanto said fingerprint tests proved Azahari Husin was one of two militants killed in the town of Batu in East Java province yesterday.
Azahari was either shot dead or killed when a fellow militant exploded a bomb.
"The identification of the suspect at the crime scene according to the fingerprint data was identical to Azahari," Gen Sutanto told reporters in Batu.
"The condition of Azahari's corpse is that it was severed around the legs and torso. He was not able to reach the button [of a bomb] because officers shot him first, but the other one was able to commit a suicide bombing."
Indonesia, Australia, Malaysia and security experts welcomed the death of Azahari, a master bombmaker blamed for a string of attacks in recent years, but some cautioned it would not eliminate the threat of radical violence in the region.
Dubbed the "demolition man" by newspapers in his native Malaysia, Azahari was the suspected brains behind several bomb attacks on Western targets in Indonesia and the top bomb maker in Jemaah Islamiah, a shadowy network linked to al-Qaeda.
Authorities say the electronics expert designed and supervised the making of the car bomb that caused the most damage in 2002 attacks on the resort island of Bali that killed 202 people.