Suspect Confesses to Bali Bombings

Indonesian police said yesterday that a man they are interrogating has admitted to participating in last month's Bali bombings that killed almost 200 people.

The country's police chief, General Da'i Bachtiar, said the man, identified as Amrozi, 35, was the owner of a white Mitsubishi van used in the biggest of the three bombings on October 12, outside the Sari Club in the tourist resort of Kuta.

"[Amrozi] used the vehicle for the bombing in Bali," Gen Bachtiar said. "He has disclosed many things and admitted his acts in Bali. We are pursuing his companions."

He said Mr Amrozi's task was to "take field responsibility", but did not explain what this meant, adding that detectives were still interrogating the mechanic from east Java and cross-checking his statements with other witnesses.

A police spokesman, Commander Prasetyo, said there were many unanswered questions concerning Mr Amrozi, who has formally been declared a suspect and is being held at a secret location. "We are still investigating whether he was the operator and executor, or controller or intellectual mastermind behind it all," he said.

Mr Amrozi was tracked down because the van used in the bombings was registered in his name, he added. "We got to him from the serial number on the engine, which was found at the crime scene."

East Java police impounded Mr Amrozi current car, which had false number plates, and seized chemicals from his home they believe might have been used to make the bombs. The chemicals were allegedly bought from a shop in the provincial capital, Surabaya.

Cmdr Prasetyo said Mr Amrozi "strongly resembled" the first of three sketches released last week. The joint Indonesian-Australian team investigating the bombings yesterday released a fourth sketch of a person they would like to question in relation to the attacks.

Officers believe six to 10 people were involved in the bombings. "Amrozi was not working alone," Cmdr Prasetyo said. "This was definitely an act of organised crime involving a group of people."

One of the key leads investigators are pursuing is the strength of the link between Mr Amrozi and Abu Bakar Ba'aysir, the radical Muslim cleric who is alleged to be the founder of Jemaah Islamiyah, an organisation linked to al-Qaida which is suspected of being behind the bombings.

According to a confidential Philippine military report leaked yesterday, Jemaah Islamiyah - which reportedly wants to establish a pan-south-east Asian Islamist caliphate - has three territorial cells, one of which is based in Mr Ba'aysir's home town of Solo, in central Java.

Dzakaria, the head of the Al Islam boarding school in Mr Amrozi's home town of Tenggulun, said the suspect had been to at least two events at his school that Mr Ba'aysir had also attended. Mr Dzakaria also said that Mr Amrozi travelled to Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand several times in the mid to late 1990s, while Mr Ba'aysir was in exile in Malaysia. It is not yet clear if the two men met overseas.

One of Mr Amrozi's two former wives, Astuti, told a local television station that her then husband underwent a transformation while he was in Malaysia. "His clothes were all different and his attitude was very different when he returned," she said, without explaining the changes. "He was not the same man at all."

Local media reported yesterday that one of Mr Amrozi's close acquaintances while he was in Malaysia was a radical Muslim who has posters praising Osama bin Laden on his walls.

Mr Ba'aysir, who is currently under arrest in connection with a series of church bombings on Christmas Eve 2000 and an alleged plot to assassinate Indonesia's president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, yesterday denied knowing anyone called Amrozi.

"I went to the Al Islam school two or three times to participate in discussion forums on the problems in the education system," he said in a television interview from the hospital where he is being detained. "But I never met anyone called Amrozi there."

He dismissed as "laughable" suggestions that he was in volved in the Bali bombings. "I was in Solo at a birthday party," he said.

Police investigators have said the first bomb, placed in Paddy's Bar, opposite the Sari Club, contained between 500g and 1kg of TNT. It was triggered electronically at about 11.05pm as the bar was filling up. Ten to 15 seconds later the bomb in the van exploded. It is thought to have contained between 50 and 100 kilos of explosives, although the nature of the bomb has yet to be confirmed.

A third, much smaller, device exploded near the American consulate on the island about 45 seconds later.

About 120 Australian officers and a couple of dozen other foreign investigators, including from Scotland Yard and the FBI, are participating in the investigation. Many diplomats believe that the Indonesian police will probably solve the crime with the foreign help.

"From what I'm hearing, the likelihood of them getting to the bottom of this and pinpointing who did it is quite high," a diplomat said.