Police fail to connect al-Qaeda with Bali bombers
The Jakarta Post, Singapore/Denpasar
National Police chief Gen. Da'i Bachtiar said on Wednesday that investigators were unable to establish a link between Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network and Muslim militants blamed for the deadly Bali bombings last October.
The police are detaining 15 of the 26 suspects in the Oct. 12 blasts that killed more than 190 people and injured some 300 others.
The investigators have linked many of the suspects with the regional Jamaah Islamiyah (JI) terror organization, allegedly connected to al-Qaeda, which was blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
But Da'i told a seminar in Singapore that it was difficult to link the Bali bombing suspects with bin Laden's terror network.
"We haven't come to any conclusion yet that there is a link between Jamaah Islamiyah and al-Qaeda. That will depend on the cooperation we have with law enforcement in Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore," he told Reuters.
The comment contradicted statements from Minister of Defense Matori Abdul Djalil who said that there was such a link, and suggested that differences remained in the Indonesian government over its campaign against terrorism.
Two days after the Bali blasts, the Australian government said it had information linking al-Qaeda to the explosions, which killed about 90 Australians.
Da'i said Indonesia was still investigating the Bali attacks with law enforcement authorities in Southeast Asia and with cooperation from the United States, Australia and Europe.
Scores of suspected members of Jamaah Islamiyah have been jailed in Singapore and Malaysia.
The U.S. and the United Nations have included Jamaah Islamiyah on a list of terrorist organizations.
Furthermore, Da'i called the Bali bombings a blessing in disguise because the attacks allowed his country to prove it is serious about tackling terrorism.
"There are many blessings that we got from the Bali bombings. We got a lot of advantages from that," he told AP while addressing the same conference aimed at wooing Singaporean investors to Indonesia.
"The Bali bombing struck Indonesia hard, but it was also a blessing in disguise. It has changed the world's negative view of Indonesia," he added.
Meanwhile, deputy chief investigator Brig. Gen. Edy Danuardi said on Wednesday that the Bali inquiry team had obtained further "important information" to develop the investigations after opening the laptop belonging to Abdul Azis, better known as Imam Samudra, the alleged mastermind of the Bali carnage.
The laptop, which was opened last Saturday night by two Australian and Indonesian computer experts, contained e-mail correspondence between Samudra and his foreign accomplices before the Bali bombings, Edy said.
He declined to give more details.
"The investigators are identifying files that have connections with the Bali bomb attacks, which files can be investigated in relation to Imam Samudra's network overseas and others that can be traced further," Edy told journalists in the Bali capital of Denpasar.
He said the new data would be used to complete evidence to be included in Samudra's case file, which is expected to be presented to prosecutors later this month.
However, the coordinator of lawyers for the bombing suspects, Qhadar Faisal Ruskandar, said Samudra denied that all the files in the laptop were his.
About 75 percent of the files are "genuine", while the rest were inserted by others, Qhadar said.
Qhadar and his colleague, Made Rahman Marassabesy, skipped the preliminary court hearing of Masykur Abdul Kadir, one of the 15 detained suspects, which went ahead on Wednesday.
The two lawyers refused to attend the pre-trial after they were twice attacked by people present at the hearing despite being tightly guarded by police.
The attacks have prompted the lawyers to urge the authorities to move the venue of the bombing trial off of Bali for security concerns.