The Risk Professional: Noordin Top killed, says Indonesia

The Indonesian Anti-Terrorist units are not known for taking prisoners. They have a simple view of terrorists: if they are in a building, they are invited to come out. If they don't, warning shots will be fired. If shots are returned, then very, very rarely does anyone come out alive.

When reports as to Noordin's death following the recent attacks in Jakarta became public, there was widespread relief. Noordin has long been recognised as the most accomplished and prolific bomb maker in the Jemaah Islamia faction, linked to al Qaeda.

But it turned out that the body thought to be his was not. And the search went on.

But today time ran out for the most wanted man in Asia Pacific.

Australia does not support the death penalty, but privately enforcement agencies universally wanted him dead after attacks on places frequented by Australians. There was no desire for him to take the stand in a show trial - and Indonesia has a habit of releasing terrorists after serving a relatively short sentence.

Noordin has wandered with seeming impunity around Indonesia and Malaysia and further afield for more than a decade, slipping into and out of countries without contact with border authorities. Indeed, if it were not for his signature bombs, he might almost have been a ghost.

But the authorities have confirmed that Noordin, who not only made bombs and instructed others to do it, was also the strategist behind individual attacks and the wider objectives.

Noordin was a relic, a lone voice campaigning under bin Laden's demands in 1998 that westerners should be killed. But although his was the only voice openly raised, he has built a network.

That network is now fragmented after a series of successful raids during the past two years. But there is a growing radicalisation of some in Indonesia, amid a drive by a minority to make the country "more Muslim."

Noordin was said to never sleep in the same house for more than two nights, never to himself use a mobile phone, never to go out during the day and never to go to Mosque and in this way to have evaded capture for so long.