Alleged Bali bomber transferred to Jakarta

Armed police today transferred the alleged mastermind of last month’s deadly Bali nightclub bombings to the Indonesian capital for more questioning.

Imam Samudra – wearing a blue prison uniform and wool cap – was brought to Jakarta’s national police headquarters just after daybreak in a convoy of armoured cars.

“He will be questioned on bomb attacks in Jakarta and several other places,” a police spokesman said. “As soon as that is finished, we hope to move him to Bali.”

Samudra was arrested in Banten province in western Java on Thursday and held there for questioning. Over the weekend, police searched a number of houses in the area as well as in Central Java province.

Officers say the 35-year-old has admitted planning the bombings on October 12 that killed nearly 200 people, mostly Western tourists. About 30 Britons were among the dead.

Meanwhile, Indonesia’s parliament prepared to pass a new anti-terrorism law replacing a temporary presidential decree that was approved immediately after the bombings.

The legislation – likely to be adopted this week – is similar and allows for suspects to be detained without trial in cases related to terrorism.

Those convicted of planning or threatening acts of terror would face penalties ranging from four years’ imprisonment to death.

Jakarta’s Kompas newspaper today said a man identified only as Iqbal, who Samudra said set off a bomb inside one of the nightclubs, had left a suicide note apologising to his family for his “martyr’s death”.

While suicide bombings are common in some parts of the world, this is the first confirmed instance in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation.

In Canberra, Australian federal police who are helping the Indonesian investigation said today that forensic evidence from the bomb scene supported Samudra’s account of a suicide bomber.

Evidence suggests the bomb in one of the nightclubs exploded three four feet from the ground near the dance floor, police said.

“It is consistent with the forensic examination of the bar and it is also consistent with what we are getting from the post-mortem examination of one of the bodies in the mortuary up in Bali,” said federal police Commissioner Mick Keelty.

Yesterday, officers searching two houses rented by Samudra and his accomplices uncovered recordings of speeches by Osama bin Laden and military training video clips.

The houses were about two miles from the Ngruki Islamic boarding school, which was run until recently by detained cleric Abu Bakar Bashir.

Bashir is the alleged spiritual head of Jemaah Islamiyah, a regional terror group that intelligence officials believe was responsible for the Bali blasts. The group is suspected of having links to al-Qaida.

Police have not named Bashir as a suspect in the Bali bombings, but he was arrested after the attack on separate charges of masterminding a string of church bombings in 2000. Bashir denies any involvement.

The recent discoveries appear to strengthen growing suspicions that Islamic radicals with sympathies to bin Laden were behind the Bali attack.

Samudra’s arrest came more than two weeks after police apprehended another suspect, Amrozi, who has confessed to providing the vehicle and chemicals used in the attack.

Investigators are hunting for at least five other suspects in the case.