AP Photo/Jefta

An Indonesian police officer stands guard at the door of the house of a suspected terrorist after a raid Saturday in Jakarta, Indonesia.

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesia's anti-terror squad arrested 11 people suspected of planning a range of attacks on domestic and foreign targets including the U.S. Embassy and a site near the Australian Embassy, police said Saturday. 

The suspects were arrested in raids Friday and Saturday in four provinces, national police spokesman Maj. Gen. Suhardi Alius said.

He said the suspects belonged to a new group called the Harakah Sunni for Indonesian Society, or HASMI.

"From evidence found at the scene, we believe that this group was well prepared for serious terror attacks," Alius said.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson told NBC News, "We have seen the reports, but cannot comment as this is an ongoing Indonesian security investigation."

Police seized a number of bombs, explosive materials, a bomb-making manual and ammunition, Alius said. They also found a 3-kilogram (6.6-pound) gas cylinder filled with highly explosive material, which had been assembled at a house in the East Java town of Madiun. Videos and images of attacks on Muslims in various parts of the world were also recovered, he said. 

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Alius said the group planned to target the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta and a plaza near the Australian Embassy and the local office of U.S. mining giant Freeport-McMoRan. It also planned to attack the U.S. Consulate in Surabaya and the headquarters of a special police force in Central Java, he said.

It was unclear how far the plans had advanced.

Alius said police are still investigating whether the group has ties with established terrorist organizations such as Jemaah Islamiyah. An investigator who spoke in condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to provide information to the media said HASMI's apparent leader, Abu Hanifah, was a Jemaah Islamiyah sympathizer.

Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation, has been battling terrorists since the 2002 bombings in Bali by militants linked to Jemaah Islamiyah which killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists.

Subsequent attacks have claimed more than 50 people, mostly Indonesians. The government has arrested more than 700 suspected terrorists and killed dozens more in an attempt to root out militants.

Earlier this month, police warned of a terrorist threat in Bali targeting a ceremony commemorating the 10th anniversary of the bombings. The country's security alert was raised to its highest level.

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Last month, police arrested 10 Islamist militants and seized a dozen homemade bombs from a group suspected of planning suicide attacks against security forces and plotting to blow up the Parliament building. The alleged bomb maker turned himself in to police while wearing an empty suicide vest.

Recent terror attacks in the country have been carried out by individuals or small groups and have targeted security forces and local "infidels" instead of Westerners, with less deadly results. The arrests announced Saturday appear to be the first in recent years to involve a group that allegedly planned to target foreign facilities. 

NBC's Catherine Chomiak contributed to this report. 

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By Ian Williams
NBC News Correspondent

One of the Sumatran orangutan’s richest habitats, an area of swampland containing the highest density of the red apes on the planet, is being illegally slashed and burned by palm oil companies to make way for palm oil plantations.

“If we can't stop them here, then there really is no hope,” said Ian Singleton as we stood on the edge of what had once been pristine forest, home to hundreds of orangutans, but now reduced to a charred wilderness as far as the eye could see. As he spoke we could hear the distant sound of a chain saw.

Singleton runs the Sumatra Orangutan Conservation Programme, an organization at the forefront of a battle to save what remains of the forest and the apes.

WATCH THE FULL REPORT: Orangutans dying as demand for palm oil soars

There are fewer than 7,000 of the critically endangered Sumatran orangutans left in the wild, according to a 2008 survey completed by Singleton and other scientists. The largest number live in a vast area of swampland and lowland forest close to the northern tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

“Orangutan paradise,” Singleton calls the area – but it’s a paradise under threat.

Land cleared, drained and burned in the Tripa Peat Swamp Forest.

The key battleground for Singleton is the Tripa Peat Swamp Forest, much of which has already been converted to palm oil plantations. The relentless march of the palm oil business is the biggest threat facing the orangutans.

A cheap, edible oil, palm oil is found in almost half of all packaged supermarket products, from instant noodles, to cookies to ice cream, and Indonesia is the world's biggest supplier.

“Look, look,” said Singleton, handing me a pair of field glasses. In the distance a large male orangutan moved gracefully across the canopy of trees. We would soon see three more.

WATCH ROCK CENTER VIDEO: 'Orangutans are dying here as we speak'

There is something spell-binding about seeing an orangutan in its natural habitat, and for a while we were glued to that point, watching these high-wire masters at play. But excitement here was quickly tempered by the realization that the area of forest we were looking at was isolated and surrounded on three sides by plantations that were moving ever closer.

Singleton concluded that these apes had just about enough forest to survive - for now.

When he believes an orangutan is in danger, he said, he sends in a team to track and sedate it, transferring the animal to a sprawling rescue center he runs on the edge of the Sumatran city of Medan.

Singleton sometimes refers to the center as a “refugee camp.”

“These are the lucky few,” Singleton told me during a visit there. “They are effectively refugees from forests that no longer exist.”

And like in refugee camps across the world, there was no shortage of agonizing stories of suffering and survival, but also resilience and hope.

Chocolate, a 2-year-old toddler, rescued from animal traders

Among the 55 orangutans in Singleton’s care was a scrawny and bewildered 2-year-old named Chocolate, the newest arrival. Merely a toddler, Chocolate wrapped his arms and legs around Singleton, who lifted him carefully from a cot designed for a child.

“He’s a bit thin, but otherwise quite fit and feisty,” Singleton said. He believes the mother was probably shot.

“There’s no way a mother would allow a baby to be taken from her, not while she’s still alive – never in a million years,” said Singleton. Among orangutans, the bond between mother and child is one of the strongest in the animal kingdom, a child staying with its mom for as many as nine years.

Most orangutans arrive at the center as toddlers, many lacking even the basic confidence to climb trees. You’d have thought that came naturally to a great ape, but some youngsters will only scale the branches in the presence of a keeper, who acts as a surrogate mom.

That’s not a term Singleton likes. The aim of his organization is to build the animals’ skills and independence for an eventual return to the wild, though initially many are dependent on him and his staff.

He also introduced me to Leuser, a big male, probably more than 40 years old and blind.

“One day he went too near farmers at the edge of the forest and they took pot shots at him. They put 62 air rifle pellets into him, mostly around the head,“ Singleton said. Forty-eight are still there, and the X-ray resembles the speckled roof of a planetarium.

In the top corner of a nearby cage, 9-year-old Bahroeni was sitting inside a large tire, one of his legs dangling, encased in a cast. He, too, had been sold as a pet when he was a toddler and, as he grew up, the nylon rope that tied him to a fence was never removed.

Plantation owners and small holders frequently regard orangutans as pests, though there is profit to be had in illegally selling off the babies as pets.

“The law is very clear, but the enforcement is very weak,” Singleton said, tickling one of the toddlers, who reacts with child-like convulsions.

The center aims to return its refugees to the wild, in an undisturbed part of the forest, as soon as they are able to go.

As we spoke, a group of keepers from the rescue center carried on a stretcher an anaesthetised young male named Dito. They lay him out on an operating table in the medical center and after making a small insertion in his neck, they implanted a transmitter.

The transmitter will help Singleton monitor Dito’s movements, “so you know what they’re doing, where they’re going. That they are OK.”

Singleton and colleague Graham Usher launch drone with camera to monitor illegal deforestation.

On the Tripa frontline, Singleton and his team are now deploying a powerful new weapon: a drone, equipped with a small camera that will help them identify illegal forest clearing.

The area is supposed to be a protected forest, and using fire to clear the land as well as converting deep peat are illegal practices under Indonesian law.

Conservationists did have one recent victory, when one of the worst culprits, a company called Kallista Alam, had one of its operating permits revoked. That’s never happened before, since Indonesia has a terrible track record in enforcing its own environmental laws.

And Singleton says satellite imagery shows that burning has continued, even after Kallista Alam’s permit was revoked.

He is now urging criminal action against such companies and others involved in the illegal clearing, asking for their permits to be revoked, and the peat land to be restored.

For all the horrible destruction laid out before us in Tripa, Singleton remains optimistic, believing that the tide may now be turning in favor of Indonesia’s once lonely conservationists, and that the impunity with which the plantations destroyed the forest is at last being challenged.

Before leaving Sumatra, Singleton took me to an area where his refugees are being re-located. He told me that for him nothing can quite match the satisfaction of seeing the often bruised and terrified animals that turn up at his rescue center back in the wild.

“Now they have a second chance of spending 30 or 40 years in the wild, and of having four or five babies,” he told me as we tracked some recently released orangutans days later.

There was a sudden movement of red fur through the thick forest canopy above us.

“I get a real kick out of this,” Singleton said. “It’s as if they never left, and if we’d not been here they’d have died.”

Editor's Note: Ian Williams' full report, 'At What Cost?' airs Thursday, October 18 at 10pm/9c on NBC's Rock Center with Brian Williams.

Leon Neal / AFP - Getty Images, file

Benny Wenda, leader of the West Papuan Independence Movement, attends a protest in London on April 15, 2010.

LONDON -- Global policing body Interpol has dropped a wanted notice for an Indonesian dissident after authorities ruled the case against him was “predominantly political in nature.”

Benny Wenda, who campaigns for his native West Papua to become independent from Indonesia, was convicted of inciting people to attack a police station and an arson attack that resulted in several deaths. However, he escaped from prison while awaiting sentence in 2002.

Wenda later arrived in the U.K. and successfully claimed political asylum, arguing that the case against him was a fabrication designed to stop his political activities.

Earlier this year, NBCNews.com reported that Interpol had issued a “red notice” for him, which alerts law enforcement agencies worldwide that he is wanted by an Interpol member state. Some countries treat red notices as an arrest warrant, but the U.K. took no steps to detain Wenda.

Interpol faces legal threat for helping oppressive regimes hunt dissidents

In a letter to campaign group Fair Trials International, the Commission for the Control of Interpol’s Files admitted the case against Wenda was “predominantly political in nature” and said Interpol had deleted the red notice.

“Interpol should be used to fight serious crime but Indonesia has been misusing it to threaten a peaceful political activist,” Jago Russell, chief executive of Fair Trials International, was quoted as saying in a statement. “We are delighted that Interpol has now woken up to this abuse but Benny’s case is not unique and safeguards are needed to stop other countries misusing Interpol and destroying lives and reputations in the process.”

Wanted activist Benny Wenda tells of 'bows and arrows' revolt

The statement said that while the red notice was active Wenda had been “unable to travel to attend campaign events to promote his cause” because of the risk of arrest.

A report by the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at the Yale Law School in 2003 found that "the West Papuan people have suffered persistent and horrible abuses" at the hands of the Indonesian government since the area was annexed by Indonesia in 1969.

It also accused Indonesian military and security forces of engaging in "widespread violence and extrajudicial killings."

Human Rights Watch's World Report 2012 said that the U.S. provides "extensive military assistance to Indonesia" and added that "impunity for members of Indonesia’s security forces remains a serious concern, with no civilian jurisdiction over soldiers who commit serious human rights abuses."

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