The Straits Times (Singapore) Monday, November 10, 2008
A Triumph Of Exhaustive Police Work John McBeth, Senior Writer THE three unrepentant Bali bombers have finally gone to their deaths, their fate inexorably sealed by a carelessly abandoned motorcycle and threads from the jeans of one of their victims who was vaporised in the stunning act of terrorism on Oct 12, 2002. It was those two early clues that led Indonesian and Australian police to the small East Java district town of Lamongan and to the modest family home of Ali Amrozi Nurhasyim, the telephone repairman who would soon come to be known as the Laughing Bomber. Amrozi, 46, his brother, Ali Ghufron, 48, and Imam Samudra, 38, died before separate firing squads on the Central Java prison island of Nusakambangan soon after midnight on Sunday, six years after the bombing of the two Bali nightclubs claimed 202 lives. The death toll, mostly from a powerful car bomb detonated outside the Sari club, made it the worst terrorist outrage since the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. Of the core group of 20 militants and 25 conspirators implicated in the plot, only Dulmatin, 38, and Javanese-Arab Umar Patek, 38, remain at large in the southern Philippines where they fled in the aftermath of the bombing. Dulmatin designed and assembled the Bali bomb, but Malaysian Azahari Hasin - later killed in a 2005 shoot-out in an East Java hill resort - had to be brought in at the last minute to resolve problems with the electronic sequencing of the 30 detonators. Even then, only one-third of the 1,100kg device actually detonated when suicide bomber Iqbal flicked a switch from inside the van - just 15 seconds after an accomplice triggered an 'attractor' backpack device in a bar across the street. Australian and Indonesian police officers meeting in a nearby hotel went to bed that night still believing a gas leak had caused the massive explosion. It was only the next morning that it became clear what had happened. As one former officer says now: 'You could have knocked me over with a feather.' In what was to prove a triumph of collaborative police work, a 350-man international task force swung into action under Bali-born police general I Made Mangku Pastika and Interpol chief Colonel Guntur Haryadi, both of whom had United Nations experience in Namibia. Gen Pastika talked twice a day with his top investigator Col Gorries Mere and other members of the 30-strong Indonesian field team to analyse the evidence, then huddled with the Australians to coordinate the workload. While the Bali police laboratory's ion scanner was able to detect high explosives, such as C4 and TNT, the Indonesians were woefully short of the equipment needed for the other non-organic explosives used in the blast. That's where the Australians came in. It was their expertise in forensics and in electronic surveillance that sustained the investigation's momentum and has since been instrumental in tracing the culprits of three other major attacks. Because most of the evidence had been burned or washed away and many of the witnesses were either dead or fighting for their lives, police soon realised that getting answers at the scene would take a long time. Turning to other avenues of inquiry, they swabbed the light switches of numerous Bali hotel rooms looking for evidence of explosives. They also had to sort through a horrific collection of heads, arms and legs at a makeshift morgue, trying to figure out how many had died. Some heads had been tossed like balls up to six blocks from the scene. Some victims just disappeared; the only trace of one security guard was part of his belt buckle. One vehicle was tossed high in the air, did a complete flip and, to the astonishment of police, neatly parked itself 20m away. Looking back now, one former Australian officer involved in the investigation says a red motorcycle parked outside a Denpasar mosque and recovered a day after the bombing provided the first crucial pointer to the identity of the bombers. Coated with residue from a small discarded bomb originally intended for either the US or Australian consulates in Bali, the 100cc Yamaha was recovered with two helmets and gloves, which enabled police to establish the DNA of the riders. But what startled investigators were three telltale switches - one that immobilised the engine and two which turned off the rear brake light and the illumination over the plate number. These counter-surveillance precautions, taken from an Al-Qaeda manual, provided the first indication that police were dealing with an organisation - even though Jemaah Islamiah (JI) was at the time only a shadow. The motorcycle was quickly traced to a local dealer who said he had sold it to three men two days before the bombing. A Balinese painter was recruited to sketch a likeness of the suspects, which experts in Canberra then enhanced on laptops using PhotoFit imaging software. Unidentified at the time, the images bore a resemblance to Amrozi, Ali Imron, another of Amrozi's brothers who had driven the bomb-laden van from Java to Bali, and logistics specialist Jhoni Hendrawan, or Idris. Two weeks later, investors finally pieced together the chassis of the Mitsubishi L-300 van used to blow up the Sari. The wreckage had been scattered over a 200m radius, the gearbox landing on the third floor of a nearby bank branch. The chassis number located near the right rear wheel well had been filed off, but scientists using special chemicals were able to re-create what looked like a string of numbers. These were distributed to traffic police all over Indonesia. A day later, a district police chief called from Central Java to report finding a car carrying that number parked in the yard of a local church. As Col Mere recalled later in an interview: 'I told him it was funny he had found the car because it had been blown up in Bali.' Obviously there had been a mistake. Carefully going over the chassis again, the Indonesians suddenly noticed the threads, caught in a small plate near the front left-hand wheel. They had been stripped from the jeans of someone who had been leaning against the van when it exploded. Under the plate was a special public transportation test number. Bali, as it turned out, is the only province in Indonesia that requires it. A subsequent search through stacks of car registration records revealed the van had been registered two years before. Tracing its four previous Balinese owners wasn't difficult. Police then focused on the fifth owner, a Javanese Muslim who ran a Bali car repair shop, but was moving back to his home town of Tuban on Java's north-east coast. He informed investigators that the van had been bought by another man in Tuban three months before. Located the next morning, the sixth owner told the eight officers who descended on his home that he had sold the vehicle to someone called Amrozi in Lamongan, 40km to the south-east. The searchers knew they were close when they learnt Amrozi had paid for the van with US dollars and Malaysian ringgit. Not many Indonesians in rural Java have access to foreign currency. They also learnt that he wanted a car with Bali plates. Col Mere instructed his men to find Amrozi's house in the small village of Tenggulun, just outside Lamongan, and place it under surveillance. The next morning, he and four other officers knocked on the door. Amrozi's mother answered and claimed her son wasn't there. The raiders burst past her and found their quarry asleep in bed. It was exactly 24 days since the bombing. All Amrozi did was laugh, the same laugh that was to chill the courtroom in Bali when he went on trial months later. He was told he was being arrested because of his connection to the van used in the Bali bombing. Concerned about a growing crowd of curious and in some cases hostile villagers, Col Mere summoned a company of Police Mobile Brigade officers to maintain security while his men sifted through the house. They soon found receipts for ammonium chlorate and sulphur, a handwritten record of expense dole-outs to three of the bombers, and a list of mobile phone numbers, some of which had been used in Bali at the time of the bombing. Still insisting he had sold the Mitsubishi van in the village market, Amrozi was taken to the regional police headquarters in Surabaya where the interrogation dragged on until long after midnight. Col Mere called Colonel Benny Mamoto, a brilliant police analyst who had been working on identifying members of the militant network since the 2000 Christmas church bombings which killed 19 people. When he heard Amrozi had been arrested, Col Mamato became very excited. 'This is 100 per cent JI,' he told Col Mere, noting that the suspect was the brother of JI's Mantiqi 1 head Ali Ghufron, alias Mukhlas. 'This is very important. This man is dangerous.' Col Mere was exhausted, but he had to give it one last try. He handed Amrozi a blank piece of paper and asked him to write out his family history. When he listed Ghufron as his older brother, he was asked what other name he (Ghufron) used. Amrozi wrote: 'Mukhlas.' After police told him they knew his brother and his association with JI, Amrozi's resolve finally cracked. For the next four hours, while the exhausted Col Mere slept, he wrote out a long detailed confession, naming seven other plotters. Mukhlas was not among them. It was the breakthrough police were looking for. When the arrest was announced two days later, the phones on the list found in his house all burst into life in places stretching from Sukoharjo, Solo and Semarang in Central Java to Jakarta and Banten to the west. Then they all just as suddenly fell silent. Investigators moved their command post to Jakarta to concentrate on a new phase of the operation, mostly relying on phone and other electronic intercepts to track the rest of the plotters. Samudra bought a new phone, but police soon learnt the number from an e-mail he had sent from one of the many Internet cafes he used travelling from Surabaya to Banten, his home province where he had recruited the two suicide bombers. On Nov 21, the trackers watched Samudra's phone signal move to the port city of Merak, where he planned to catch a ferry to Sumatra and then travel on to a safe house in Palembang. Although they lost the signal as he reached the harbour, Col Mere flooded the port with detectives, some manning checkpoints and others searching the departing ferries. It was while they were checking a bus that one of the officers noticed a man in the backseat. Samudra may have had a cap drawn low over his face, but he was also wearing a bright red T-shirt with a large yellow star. Incongruously, his wife was sitting next to him dressed from head to toe in a black chador - unusual, even in Muslim Indonesia. Samudra's confession allowed police to locate the JI command post in Solo and subsequently arrest eight more suspects, including Ghufron who they initially mistook for Ali Imron. The executions yesterday passed with little outpouring of sympathy. Most Indonesians were as horrified as anyone that such a crime could be committed on their soil. The dedicated policemen who tracked down the militants are seemingly ambivalent about their fate, seeing it as the conclusion to a successful criminal investigation. But they do have distinct impressions about what made each of them tick. Samudra, they say, was a classic psychotic - rational one minute, 'off the wall' the next. Amrozi was little more than a terrorist wannabe, living in the shadow of the committed, Afghan-trained Mukhlas. All three are now dead. [EMAIL PROTECTED] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
