THE meeting was held at a restaurant in the area of Nagoya, Batam. There, on Thursday evening two weeks ago, at about 20:00, some 20 plainclothes policeman discussed the strategy of secret operations: raids on gambling places in Batam. Their faces showed no exhaustion. In fact, the personnel of the National Police Headquarters had arrived only a few hours earlier in the largest city of the Riau Islands province.

At 23:00 the meeting was over. Soon