Experts cast doubt on police findings in Bali blast case

Emmy Fitri and Damar Harsanto, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

An antiterrorism officer and a chemical expert have both expressed doubts about police claims that they had identified the perpetrators and the motive behind the Oct. 12 Bali bombings after arresting the suspect Amrozi.

There are numerous questions swirling around Amrozi's arrest and his statement to the police, especially since he was not accompanied by a lawyer during the first day of questioning.

There are more question marks hanging over Amrozi's statement and his alleged confession to being involved in the bombings. For one thing, Amrozi must demonstrate that he is capable of managing a small team and clandestine operations so as to achieve the stated target: killing as many people as possible.

One active member of the Army's Special Force (Kopassus) who has spent half of his 19-year career in antiterrorism and once studied demolition, finds it difficult to buy Amrozi's confession.

"There is, for example, the question on how much money was needed to run such an operation. If it is a secret operation aimed at causing deaths, thus making it a high-risk operation, it will require hundreds of millions of rupiah," he said.

"Any black operation is a meticulous job. A bombing like the one in Bali needs people with certain expertise, careful planning and a strategic advance team to do the research before the plan is laid out," he said on condition of anonymity.

"The operation coordinator must recruit a team of less than 10 people to make it effective. Each member must be equipped with particular expertise," he explained.

"If Amrozi and his group were only tasked with bringing the explosives to the site, this would make sense. I believe he had no greater role than that," he speculated.

"It's not an easy task even for military personnel who are trained for operations like that. To be able to practice demolition theory, one must study intensively for more than a year. A month or two is not enough," he added.

Conventional explosives or homemade bombs which contain chemicals like ammonium nitrate, potassium chlorate, and ammonium powder sulfur would not have caused such a massive impact as in the Bali blast, he stressed.

A chemical expert from the University of Indonesia, Agus Nurhadi, who conducted independent research from Nov. 3 to Nov. 4 at the blast site, said conventional explosives were "too small to have caused such ultimate devastation" as happened to the Sari Club.

"The explosion at the Sari Club was so strong it shattered the L-300 van into small pieces, created a crater, and caused two steel poles five meters away from the blast center to bend by 15 degrees ... It must have been C4 or some other high explosive," said Agus.

The police have concluded that there were two blasts, a smaller one inside Paddy's Cafe and another massive one near the Sari Club. Police have also revealed that the bomb used in Paddy's Cafe consisted of one kilogram of TNT (trinitrotoluene), while the one in the Sari Club was a mixture between 50 kilograms and 150 kilograms of aluminum nitrate, a derivative of RDX (Cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine).

Besides the almost 200 dead and many others missing, the explosions left four buildings totally destroyed, 17 shops damaged, and cracks in buildings located up to 200 meters away.

However, Agus played down allegations that the bomb was micronuclear.

"If the bomb was a micronuke, the copper part of electricity wires located five meters from the explosion epicenter would have melted. But it did not, only the plastic coating melted. This means that the heat caused by the explosion was around 250 degrees Celsius. A micronuke would have created heat of around 800 degrees Celsius," said Agus.

However, Agus added his team had yet to make a final conclusion as to their findings from the blast site.

Police have said that Amrozi, a graduate of an Islamic junior high school, and his group perpetrated the bombing. However, they have yet to determine his definitive role in the attack.

Amrozi was initially said to be the owner of the L-300 minivan suspected of being used in the bombing, which means he was in Bali when the bombing took place.

A few days later, Amrozi was named as the field coordinator who allocated various duties among his accomplices, which could mean he was not necessarily in Bali at the time of the blasts. The police withdrew the first allegation after the testimony of Zakaria, the founder of the Al Islam Muslim boarding school in Lamongan, who said Amrozi was watching TV in the former's home when the bombing occurred.

Later Amrozi, whose brother co-founded the boarding school with Zakaria, was named as the one who bought the raw materials for the explosives as shown by a number of purchase receipts from a chemicals store in Lamongan.

Chief of the joint investigating team, Insp. Gen. I Made Mangku Pastika, recently revealed a preliminary motive for the bombing. He quoted Amrozi's confession as saying that Amrozi and his group wanted to kill as many Americans as possible because the U.S. was oppressing Muslims.

The public, however, has a right to be skeptical as the police still have to arrest Amrozi's accomplices. Only after their arrest can the police hope to reveal the full story.