As a team from Indonesia’s elite police unit, Detachment 88, crept into place around his hideaway, Azahari bin Husin, 48, was working with an accomplice on the explosive devices that had made his name.

They had more than 30 small charges with intricate electronic settings, which police experts think were intended to detonate larger bombs. Computer disks, several mobile phones and jihadi tracts littered the main room of the small house.

It was the kind of operation at which Azahari excelled, putting his training in statistics and logical analysis to work in planning a sequence of bombings. Indonesian intelligence sources believe he was plotting a Christmas Eve massacre in churches, clubs and hotels.

A rapid police analysis in the last 48 hours of computer material and documents found at the site has left senior officers in no doubt of the plan for a Christmas blitz aimed at killing foreigners and stirring up communal hatred. The attacks would have been centred on Bali and Jakarta, they believe.

Fortunately for the intended victims, the explosives demolished Azahari’s house instead and ended the “Demolition Man’s” career in Al-Qaeda.

After hundreds of deaths, thousands of man hours and millions of dollars expended on an intensive international covert operation, it came down to 18 commandos and 50 policemen closing in on two of the most dangerous men in Asia.

Azahari had the blood of 28 Britons slaughtered in the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings on his hands. They were among 202 innocents who died in the outrage. After Bali came a suicide bombing in 2003 at the J W Marriott hotel in Jakarta, where the jihadis killed Indonesian staff.

Last year Azahari personally led a bungled suicide attack on the Australian embassy which betrayed his callous methods. The man at the wheel of the van was not told he was on a one-way mission. Azahari bailed out seconds before the blast and, as an Australian source remembered it yesterday: “We picked a bit of the driver out of the trees a month or two later.” A handful of Indonesians died.

Azahari’s terrorist pedigree was impeccable. After studying in the 1980s at Reading, where he was remembered as “perfectly normal”, he fell into the company of extremists on his return home to Malaysia.

They were members of a religious studies group founded by the radical Indonesian preacher Abu Bakar Bashir and by the late Abdullah Sungkar, spiritual founders of Jemaah Islamiah, the local “affiliate” of Al-Qaeda.

Jemaah Islamiah preached the dream of an Islamic superstate to be imposed across the patchwork of races, religions and cultures in this part of the world. It was a vision rejected by most Indonesians.

That did not deter the extremists. Azahari took part in a crucial meeting in Bangkok in 2002 with a terrorist known as Hambali, who was close to Osama Bin Laden. The conversation set in motion a trail of havoc unbroken even after Hambali was seized by the CIA.

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