One of Southeast Asia's most wanted suspects, Noordin Mohammad Top, is believed to still be in Indonesia, a senior Indonesian police officer said today.

"We believe he is still in Indonesia and still alive," said Senior Superintendent Tito Karnavian, head of intelligence at Detachment 88, an elite US-trained unit of the Indonesian National Police.

Noordin, a Malaysian, was a key member of the Jemaah Islamiah (JI) extremist network, which authorities have blamed for a series of deadly attacks including the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people.

Fellow Malaysian Azahari Husin, a JI bomb expert, was killed in a police last November, while Noordin narrowly escaped arrest during a separate raid that month.

Analysts say the two had possibly split off to form a more hardline group before Azahari's death.

Karnavian said he believed Noordin is not directly connected with suspected militants arrested in recent raids in the Indonesian cities of Yogyakarta and Surabaya. Police found explosives and books on "jihad" during the raids.

"It is a different faction," he said, adding that the seven militants arrested during the raids are believed to belong to a JI group under Abu Dujana.

Karnavian was speaking to reporters after delivering a presentation to the Global Security Asia conference on "homeland security".

Surabaya raid

In the Surabaya raid, Indonesian police found about 12.5 kilograms of TNT, 14 kilograms of other explosives, 20 detonators and 101 books on jihad, a police spokesman said on Monday.

Last week, one man was shot dead and another injured during a raid on suspected JI militants in Yogyakarta, police said.

Detachment 88 has killed or arrested more than 200 members of Jemaah Islamiyah, Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, told the conference on Tuesday.

But despite the police success in targeting JI cells, the group's structure remains intact, he said.