A team hunting Noordin Mohammad Top surrounded a house in a village in Temanggung district of central Java and exchanged gunfire with a number of suspected militants.

Metro TV in Indonesia reported that police arrested two suspected militants in a nearby town earlier on Friday who gave them information that led them to the house.

A source at Indonesia's anti-terrorism unit Detachment 88 told Reuters the raid on the remote house in rice fields had started at about 5 pm local time with sporadic exchanges of automatic weapons continuing for several hours.