Police make new arrest in Bali blast probe
The Jakarta Post, Denpasar
Police have made a new arrest in connection with the Oct. 1 Bali bombing incident as they struggle to obtain solid information about the identity of the suicide bombers that could lead them to the masterminds.
National Police deputy spokesman Brig. Gen. Soenarko said that a 27-year-old man with the initials CR was apprehended late on Monday in the North Sulawesi town of Takengon.
"He was apprehended last evening, and until this afternoon he was still being interrogated intensively by the North Sulawesi provincial police," he was quoted as saying on Tuesday by Antara.
He explained that the investigation team, in cooperation with the North Sulawesi Police, had looked for CR after receiving tips from witnesses in the terror attacks, carried out almost simultaneously at three cafes on the popular resort island that killed 23 people including the three bombers.
Soenarko, however, added that police could not yet determine whether CR was involved in the attacks as investigations were still underway.
He said that CR was an activist at an Islamic boarding school in East Java. When captured by the police, he was holding a number of different identity cards with different addresses, including for Bogor (West Java), Gorontalo (Gorontalo province), Jember (East Java), and Denpasar.
He said that the perpetrators of the first bomb attacks on Bali in Oct. 2002 also had a number of different identity cards.
The police last week made two arrests, but later released them as they had no connection with the bombers or the incident.
Police have been under intense pressure to speed up the investigation into the bombings as it has now been two months since the attacks and they are largely still in the dark about the identity of both the suicide bombers and the masterminds. Some officials have blamed Malaysian bomb expert Dr. Azahari and Noordin M. Top for the attacks.
But National Police Chief Gen. Sutanto shrugged off the criticism, claiming that police had made progress in the investigation of the case, but said that he could not publicly disclose the nature of this progress.
He was speaking to the press after a meeting with Muslim clerics in Tangerang, Banten, calling on them to assist police in preventing and curbing terror.
He said that police had been doing a good job in trying to resolve the case, pointing out that just three hours after the attacks they could come to the conclusion that it was carried out by suicide bombers.
Sutanto declined to respond to a question from the press as to whether Azahari was still hiding inside the country or had fled overseas.
Police on Monday began distributing tens of thousands of photographs showing the reconstructed faces of the three suicide bombers in a bid to reveal their identity.