Reading Roars!

It has emerged that an al Qaeda-linked extremist thought by Indonesian and Malaysian security officials to have masterminded last weekend’s Bali atrocities had been a student at Reading University. The three suicide bombings on Saturday 1 October killed 22 people and injured 135.

Malaysian Dr Azahari Bin Husin, suspected leader of militant Islamic group Jemaah Islamiah (JI) and dubbed “Demolition Man” by the media for his bomb-making expertise, studied for a doctorate at the university’s Department of Land Management during the 1980s. Azahari and Noordin M Top, also of JI, are also linked by police to the 2002 attacks in a Bali nightclub, killing 202, and the attack two years later on Jakarta’s Australian Embassy, killing 10 and injuring more than 200.

contacted Craig Hillsely, Press Officer at Reading University, for a statement on Azahari’s alleged education there. The full text is provided here:

Azahari Husin studied for a doctorate at the University of Reading in the late 1980s in what was then the Department of Land Management, which is now the Department of Real Estate and Planning.

In 1990, he submitted his PhD thesis, which was in the subject area of real estate - not engineering as some media reports have suggested. The broad topic of his thesis was house prices in Malaysia, and the title was:

The construction of regression-based mass appraisal models: a methodological discussion and an application to housing submarkets in Malaysia.

When Azahari Husin was at Reading, he appeared to be a completely normal student. It is not thought he maintained any contact with the University once he had completed his thesis.

It is a shame that a student who devoted himself to research related to construction has become a man focused on destruction and the taking of innocent human life.