Police find third body, live bomb in blast site

JAKARTA (JP): National Police found a third body, a huge bomb and hundreds of Molotov Cocktails on Friday buried deep under rubble, at the bomb blast site on Jl. Perahu, known among locals as Jl. Tangkuban Perahu, in the Guntur subdistrict of Setiabudi, South Jakarta.

Bomb squad officers were seen on Friday carefully searching for more hidden bombs or bodies possibly stuck in the rubble, in what was an Acehnese students' dormitory, before a bomb blast ripped through it on Thursday.

Officers immediately located the active bomb found on Friday and sent it to the National Police mobile brigade (Brimob) Headquarters in Kelapa Dua, Depok, for further examination.

President Abdurrahman Wahid condemned the Thursday bombing, calling it an effort by certain parties to "provoke a clash between the Indonesian Military and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM)."

Meanwhile, Jakarta Police chief Insp. Gen. Sofyan Yacob said on Friday that in the past 48 hours, his detectives had grilled 18 witnesses in a series of marathon police questioning sessions.

"We found out that the dormitory was a place where bombs were possibly being made," Sofjan told reporters at Jakarta Police headquarters.

Sofjan said that another possibility was that the dormitory could have been where homemade bombs were being stored, by a "highly organized" group.

"Either way, evidence already removed from the dormitory, suggests that the people living in the dormitory had a big agenda ahead of them, and were highly organized."

Two corpses were found on Thursday, following the blast which caused extensive damage to the building.

Sofjan confirmed that the bomb, which blasted on Thursday, contained the high explosive trinitrotoluene (TNT).

Amongst the evidence found, were several savings accounts books, two ID cards of two political parties and a passport in the name of an Acehnese man that police are currently looking for.

Sofjan added that police were not eliminating the possibility, that the bombs were actually meant to be placed, in a number of crowded areas on May 12.

"Tomorrow (Saturday) is the day on which students across the capital will commemorate the 1998 deaths of the four Trisakti University students. Police have received news that the bombs reportedly were to be placed in crowded areas to deliberately cause mayhem. However, they blew up beforehand," Sofjan told reporters.

Jakarta Police chief of detectives Sr. Comr. Adang Rochana has declared four living suspects in the incident.

He said that they were currently being suspected of knowing about a number of bombing plans, and failing to report their knowledge to the police.

Adang identified the four as Taufik Abdullah, 31, coordinator of the "students" at the dormitory; Erwin Abdurrahman, 41; Teuku Hananan, 40, and Muslihul Ma'arif, 37. All four, he said, had lived at the dormitory.

Adang added that even as police had yet to come up with conclusive evidence, the source of the bomb blast reportedly came from the ninth of the 10 rooms at the dormitory.

"The ninth room was Muslihul's... that was where the bomb allegedly exploded. Muslihul was not present at the time it went off," Adang told reporters.

He added that police found several documents on the Aceh Referendum Information Center (Sira) inside the building, and that police were scheduled to question a Sira leader, as a witness in the case.

"Taufik, our main suspect, told me that a Sira activist, identified as Gafi, had met him five days before Thursday's blast, and asked Taufik if he would like to join him (Gafi) in blowing up Java," Adang told reporters.

He added that police were currently hunting for three people named by the current suspects, as people who were directly involved in the incident.(ylt/byg)