A BRITISH-educated bombmaker believed to have masterminded both Bali bombings blew himself up yesterday when an anti-terrorist unit surrounded his hideout in Indonesia.

Azahari bin Husin, a former student of Reading University known as the “Demolition Man”, was cornered with some of his followers in Batu on East Java. The gang threw grenades and shot at police before two explosions tore the roof off the building, killing all those inside. Azahari had boasted that he always wore a suicide vest, as he was determined never to be captured.

Members of Detachment 88, the counter-terror unit that staged the ambush, said that Azahari’s body was in pieces but his face was recognisable. Officers evacuated the area after spotting wiring around what they believed was Azahari’s body, fearful that he had boobytrapped the building. Azahari, 43, was sent to an al-Qaeda camp in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the 1990s. He was named as the bombmaker behind the 2002 suicide attacks on tourist bars in Bali. He was linked to the bombings in Jakarta in 2003, the Australian embassy last year, and last month’s suicide bombings in Bali. Scotland Yard has been investigating claims that Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 bombers, visited Azahari in Malaysia in 2002 and 2003.

Fellow students at Reading remembered him as “brilliant but shy” during his years studying for a PhD. Soon after returning to Malaysia he fell under the influence of two radical preachers. He abandoned his wife and sons, and went into hiding. Azahari and Noordin Mohammed Top, his alleged accomplice whose whereabouts is still unknown, have been on Indonesia’s most wanted list for the past five years.

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