Indonesian authorities have said they plan to deport a British woman married to a slain Indonesian militant because of a visa violation and her alleged link to a hard-line religious group.

Police said Tazneen Miriam Sailar was taken to Jakarta’s immigration detention centre after the country’s Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre linked her to the religious group Islamic Defenders Front, which was officially outlawed on December 30.

National Police spokesperson Ahmad Ramadhan said Ms Sailar, a charity fundraiser who grew up in Manchester, converted to Islam when she married a now-deceased Indonesian militant, Asep Ahmad Setiawan, in 2010.

Mr Setiawan, a member of Indonesia’s al-Qaida-linked Jemaah Islamiyah network, died in a combat zone in Syria in 2014, Mr Ramadhan said.

The group was blamed for a series of attacks in Indonesia, including the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists.

“We are still investigating whether she has a role in terrorist acts,” Mr Ramadhan said.

Ms Sailar’s lawyer, Farid Ghozali, said her client had been a humanitarian activist for disaster victims in Indonesia and abroad since 2005.

“We are only focusing on her immigration offences as she has no terrorism charge,” the lawyer said.

Immigration authorities have been co-ordinating with British diplomats on her deportation, Ahmad Nursaleh, spokesperson for the Directorate General of Immigration, said.

He added that Ms Sailar’s visa had expired two years ago.

Mr Nursaleh did not say when the deportation would occur.

Ms Sailar has a 10-year-old son born in Indonesia.

The British Embassy in Jakarta declined to comment.

The politically influential Islam Defenders Front was banned after its leader, Rizieq Shihab, was arrested on charges of inciting people to breach pandemic restrictions by holding events with large crowds.

It wants Islamic Shariah law to apply to all of Indonesia’s 230 million Muslims. The group has gained significant influence in recent years through humanitarian and charity work.

A court banned Jemaah Islamiyah in 2008, and the group was weakened by a sustained crackdown on militants by Indonesia’s counterterrorism police with US and Australian support.

A new threat has emerged in recent years inspired by Islamic State group attacks abroad.

Indonesian police have shot dead six followers of a firebrand cleric who returned last month from a three-year exile in Saudi Arabia after criminal charges against him were dropped.

Jakarta Police Chief Muhammad Fadil Imran said officers were following a car carrying 10 supporters of Rizieq Shihab, the leader of the Islamic Defenders Front, early on Monday morning. He said the followers attacked the police with guns and swords, threatening the officers’ safety.

“The officers then took firm and measured action so that six died from the group of 10 people,” he said at a news conference. He did not give further details of the violence.

An official of the Islamic Defenders Front, Ahmad Shabri Lubis, gave a different account, saying that Mr Shihab and his family were heading to a place to deliver a sermon and that guards travelling with them had been shot.

“On their way to the sermon location, the group was intercepted by unknown people that we strongly believed were part of an operational group to stalk and harm him. Those unknown people stopped and did the shooting of the family guards,” Mr Lubis said.

Mr Imran said police had been scheduled to interrogate Mr Shihab on Monday morning over an alleged violation of coronavirus health regulations during his daughter’s wedding reception on November 14, and they had received information about plans for a mass mobilisation of his supporters at Jakarta police headquarters during his questioning.

As of Monday evening, Mr Shihab had not appeared for the questioning, his second police summons after an earlier one last Tuesday.

Mr Shihab was welcomed by tens of thousands of followers when he returned to Indonesia from exile on November 10. He had left Indonesia in 2017 to go on an umrah, or minor pilgrimage, to Mecca shortly after police charged him in a pornography case and with allegedly insulting the official state ideology, Pancasila.

Police dropped both charges last year due to weak evidence, but authorities in Saudi Arabia had banned him from leaving the country without any explanation.

His return comes as Islamist forces are gaining political strength in Indonesia.

The Islamic Defenders Front was once on the political fringes and has a long record of vandalising nightspots, hurling stones at Western embassies and attacking rival religious groups. It wants Islamic Shariah law to apply to Indonesia’s 230 million Muslims.

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