Investigators to confront Ba'asyir with Samudra

Wahyoe Boediwardhana, The Jakarta Post, Denpasar, Bali

Police plan to confront Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir with Abdul Azis, alias Imam Samudra, and other key suspects in the Bali bombing as they seek to confirm the suspects' claims about Ba'asyir's involvement in the country's worst terrorist attack.

The head of the team investigating the Bali bombing, Insp. Gen. I Made Mangku Pastika, said the meetings would take place around mid-February.

"We are still at the stage of examining (this alleged connection). So we will cross-check the suspects' statements ... then link them with the facts we know," Pastika said.

Ba'asyir leads the Ngukri Islamic boarding school in Solo, Central Java. He is also the alleged spiritual leader of Jamaah Islamiyah (JI), an underground organization the United Nations labeled a terrorist group following the Oct. 12 Bali bombings.

For months, however, police have denied that Ba'asyir was linked to the bombing, until last week.

National Police chief Gen. Da'i Bachtiar said last week that Ba'asyir gave his blessing to the terrorist attack, and suspects claimed that the Muslim cleric knew much about the operation.

But police said it was still too early to name Ba'asyir a suspect in the attack.

Police arrested Ba'asyir late last year for his alleged role in a string of church bombings in 2000 and a plot to assassinate President Megawati Soekarnoputri when she was still vice president.

For now, police only have the suspects' statements linking Ba'asyir to the Bali bombings, Pastika said, adding that investigators were looking for other evidence.

The four key suspects in the bombings, Amrozi, his brother Ali Gufron, alias Mukhlas, Ali Imron and Imam Samudra, said they met with Ba'asyir at the Ngukri boarding school last May and July, and several days after the bombings in October.

Meanwhile, a visiting team from the Malaysian police questioned four key suspects in the Bali bombings to cross-check information from a Malaysian suspect on the flow of funds to finance the Oct. 12 terrorist attack, an Indonesian Police officer said on Sunday.

The three Malaysian police officers arrived on Saturday to cross-check statements by Wan Min bin Wan Mat, one of several Malaysian suspects named in connection with the Bali case, said Bali Police chief Sr. Comr. Eddy Kusumawijaya.

"It was not an interrogation but part of connecting statements provided by suspects in Malaysia, like Wan Min, with these Bali blast suspects," he said.

Police believe that JI funded the terrorist attack, which killed over 190 people, mainly foreign tourists.

But different suspects have claimed that different amounts of money were used for the operation.

A spokesman for the Bali investigation team, Sr. Comr. Zainuri Lubis, said Wan Min claimed to have given US$35,500 to Mukhlas.

However, Mukhlas said he received $500 less than that amount.

Also, according to Malaysian news reports, Wan Min confessed to handing over $95,000 to Samudra when they met in Pattani, Thailand, early in 2002.

But this was disputed by Samudra, who said earlier, "I don't know, money isn't my business."

Bali Police chief Eddy refused to discuss the results of the meeting between the Malaysian police officers and the four suspects.

Their arrival followed a visit to Malaysia by a team of Indonesian officers to question Wan Min over the alleged flow of money from JI.