Police says shots fired during raid in Indonesia

SOLO, Indonesia -- Counterterrorism forces opened fire during a raid on a house in Central Java, police and witnesses said, amid investigations into suicide hotel bombings in the capital in July.

An anti-terror unit cordoned off a rental house in a suburb of the city of Solo, a stronghold for hardline Islamist groups, police Col. Joko Irwanto said early Thursday.

Shots were heard for several hours starting late Wednesday night, witnesses said.

The raid comes as police continue a massive manhunt for perpetrators of attacks on the J.W. Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta on July 17. The blasts killed seven people and wounded more than 50, ending nearly four years without terrorist strikes in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country.

Several suspects have been detained or gunned down in raids in recent weeks, but the alleged terrorist mastermind, Malaysian fugitive Noordin Muhammad Top, remains at large. Police are also still searching for several militant operatives believed to have planned the operation and recruited the bombers.

Noordin allegedly leads a breakaway group of the Southeast Asian terrorist network Jemaah Islamiyah, which carried out a string of bombings in Indonesia in recent years with the support of al-Qaida.

Terrorist attacks have killed 250 people in Indonesia since 2002, most of them in the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing that left more than 200 people dead, most of them foreign tourists.

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