Police identify five more Bali blast victims
Police identify five more Bali blast victims
A'an Suryana and Fabiola Desy Unidjaja, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The multinational team investigating the Bali terror bombs
identified on Tuesday five more victims from the Oct. 12 blasts,
leaving 17 more bodies unidentified and some 200 missing persons.
Brig. Gen. Edward Aritonang, spokesman for the inquiry team,
revealed that the five victims were I Made Martana, a 35-year-old
Indonesian man, Jonathan Simandjuntak, a 27-year-old Indonesian
man; Andrea Hore, a 38-year-old Australian woman; Michael Don
Pascal, a 23-year-old Swiss male and Justin Graeme, a 31-year-old
Australian man.
"The police are still conducting DNA tests to identify the 17
other bodies," said Aritonang in a press conference in his
office.
The DNA identification process is for those bodies that were
charred beyond recognition.
Before matching the DNAs with their relatives's ones, the
police investigators also sought information on the victims from
their belongings and witnesses to strengthen the test's results.
Asked about the body of one Iqbal, who according to main
suspect Imam Samudra, set off a suicide bomb, Aritonang said that
his body might be among the remaining 17 bodies which were still
being examined.
He, however, acknowledged that the police were facing
difficulties in identifying Iqbal because besides the remaining
17 bodies, there were still a great number of body parts which
still have to be identified.
It was not clear when the team would begin a serious
investigation between the discrepancy of the identified and
unidentified bodies and the 200 or so people who were still
reportedly missing. Some of those may still be on holiday in
other parts of the archipelago
The police put the death toll to 185 while volunteers and
social workers said previously that they have received reports on
more than 200 who were killed in the incident because they did
not returned home.
Currently, medical faculty at the Airlangga University has
been relatives of Iqbal's in an attempt to match DNA samples and
identify.
Meanwhile, Vice President Hamzah Haz expressed his
appreciation of the fine police work and the progress they had
made.
However, he reiterated that the police should carry out the
investigation thoroughly to find out if there were others behind
Samudra.
Hamzah, who has aligned himself with fundamentalist Muslims in
the country, seemed to cast doubt on earlier findings by
suggesting that the police focus their investigation on finding
out whether the bomb blasts were connected to alleged terrorist
network Al-Qaeda, or the outlawed Jamaah Islamiyah.
The police have previously mentioned that there were links to
both of the terror networks.