Indonesia Jails Seven Men for Supporting IS

An Indonesian court Tuesday sentenced seven men to between three and five years in jail for supporting the Islamic State group, weeks after the extremist network launched a deadly assault on Jakarta.

Court officials said four of the men on trial had traveled to Syria to undertake military training with IS, while the three other culprits helped purchase tickets and recruited people to join the group. 

"Indonesians who departed for Syria and supported IS should be considered to have conducted terrorism acts," Mochammad Arifin, a presiding judge over several of the cases, said. 

Tuah Febriwansyah, who received a five-year sentence on Tuesday, told the court that he had known one of the culprits in last month's attacks that killed four civilians and four assailants.

Hundreds of Indonesians are feared to have travelled to the Middle East to join the IS group, which controls vast swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq. Several have been detained on their return.  

Counter-terror officials, however, complain that current laws are still too weak in the Muslim-majority country to prevent extremists from travelling to Syria and to block the spread of radical information on the Internet.