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.