Police hunt two more suspects in Bali probe

INDONESIA announced a fresh breakthrough in the Bali bombing probe yesterday.

Police have said they are hunting two brothers of a man who has confessed to involvement in the blasts that killed more than 180 people.

Major-General Made Mangku Pastika, head of a multinational team searching for the Bali bombers, identified the brothers of their chief suspect, Amrozi, as Ali Imron and Ali Fauzi and said they had buried an arms cache near their village.

He said they had formally been named as suspects for the attacks. Both are teachers at a conservative Islamic boarding school at the family’s small village in East Java province.

Police said they suspected about 10 people were involved in the October 12 attacks that destroyed nightclubs in Bali’s Kuta Beach.

They have previously said all the 10 were all Indonesians.

The world’s most populous Muslim nation has been under enormous international pressure to make progress in the investigation of the attack, the most devastating in the world since the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington.

Pastika said the two brothers had been named suspects over the Bali bombing case and a case of illegal possession of weapons.

Police said on Monday Amrozi was a student of detained Indonesian Muslim preacher Abu Bakar Bashir - the alleged spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiah. This south-east Asian militant group has been linked to the Bali blasts and the al-Qaida network, which has been blamed for the September 11, 2001 attacks.

In Jakarta, police said they would ignore Bashir’s refusal to co-operate in a probe over Christian church bombings in Indonesia in 2000 and a plot to kill the president. Instead, they would finish the investigation and lodge their case with state prosecutors.

Bashir, 64, has not been directly linked to the Bali attacks. Speaking earlier at a news conference on the resort island, Pastika said Imron and Fauzi had buried a cache of weapons that Amrozi had given them in neighbouring East Java.

Pastika said the stash comprised seven guns including two M-16 rifles and 5,000 rounds of ammunition that had been hidden in a forest not far from Amrozi’s village of Tenggulun.

“The weapons were buried there by Ali Imron and Ali Fauzi on November 7. Amrozi gave them to these people, whom we are now looking for,” Pastika said at the news conference.

Pastika said another Amrozi brother, named Mukhlas, was in Malaysia, but it was unclear if he was linked to the blasts. Deputy national police spokesman Edward Aritonang said a brother whom he identified as Gufron was a Bali attack suspect.

Officials have speculated Mukhlas and Gufron might be the same person.