Police 'closer to naming Bali bombers'

The investigation into the Bali terrorist attacks gathered pace today after police said that one of the alleged masterminds narrowly escaped capture in a raid and that they were closer to identifying the suicide bombers.

They were also trying to trace phone calls made by the wife of a key terror suspect to the Indonesian resort island days before the near-simultaneous October 1 attacks on three crowded restaurants.

The death toll in the attacks, meanwhile, climbed to 23, after one of the injured died in hospital.

The bombings’ alleged mastermind, Noordin Mohamed Top, narrowly escaped capture yesterday after he fled a remote village in central Java province’s Purwantoro district hours before a raid by anti-terror police, police said.

Noordin and his close aide Azahari bin Husin are two of south-east Asia’s most wanted men and believed to be key members of the al-Qaida-linked Jemaah Islamiyah – the group suspected of carrying out the restaurant bombings.

The two Malaysians have kept one step ahead of a massive hunt for years, moving constantly in densely populated areas of the sprawling nation of 220 million people and more than 10,000 islands.

Noordin and Azahari are suspected of orchestrating the Bali strike – perhaps with the help of groups or individuals outside the Jemaah Islamiyah network, which has been severely weakened by the arrests of several key leaders in recent years, police said.

Acting on a tip, about 20 officers moved in on the house in Purwantoro at around 4am yesterday, only to learn that Noordin had fled nearly three hours earlier, said Abdul Madjid, a police chief in the city of Solo.

“We can confirm it was him,” said Madjid, adding that police had been forced to delay the raid by several hours because they were worried he was armed with explosives. By the time reinforcements arrived “it was too late”.

Police have claimed several times in the past few years to have narrowly captured the Malaysian fugitives, most recently in the West Javanese city of Bandung almost exactly two years ago. There was no way to independently confirm if the man who escaped yesterday was Noordin.

However, investigators appeared to be making headway in other areas of their investigation, with central Java’s police chief Maj Gen Chairul Rasyid saying authorities were close to identifying two of the three suicide bombers.

He also revealed that the wife of another top terror suspect – Zulkarnaen - made phone calls to the island days before the strike.

“Three days before the bombings last week, his wife made several phone calls to Bali,” Madjid said. “We have given the phone numbers that she contacted to the Bali police for them to trace them.”

Indonesia’s top anti-terror official, Maj Gen Ansyaad Mbai, also revealed that arrested Jemaah Islamiyah members – including Noordin’s bodyguard – told police two months before the Bali bombings that the network was plotting a terrorist attack in Indonesia.

He refused to give further details about the plot or the arrests, saying only he was convinced Noordin and Azahari were involved.

“It was clearly them that prepared everything,” Mbai said.

Police say one of their main priorities is identifying the bombers, since doing so could help them hunt down the masterminds and – if Jemaah Islamiyah is involved – give them a better understanding about the organisation’s new face.

The suicide bombers were part of a “new generation” of terrorists, and probably recruited only recently, perhaps specifically for the weekend attacks, said Bali police chief Maj Gen I Made Mangku Pastika.

Photographs of their severed heads, found yards from the blast sites, have been circulated in the media nationwide and shown to several jailed Jemaah Islamiyah members. So far, none of the militants have claimed to recognise them.

Jemaah Islamiyah is also believed to have been behind the October 12, 2002 nightclub bombings on Bali that killed 202 people, and the 2003 and 2004 blasts at the JW Marriott hotel and the Australian embassy, both in Jakarta, that together killed 22 people.