Women caught with suspicious chemical

Rusman and Fadli, The Jakarta Post, Samarinda/Batam

Police in the East Kalimantan town of Nunukan have detained two women and seized three tons of explosive substances, an officer said on Monday.

Separately, a bomb hoax forced thousands of office employees in Batam, Riau province, to flee in panic.

Nunukan police chief Adj. Sr. Comr. Ince A. Rivai said the arrest of the two women began when port officials in the regency which abuts Malaysia inspected 62 sacks of ammonium nitrate, a chemical substance used chiefly as fertilizer, but now seems to be the substance of choice for would-be terrorists interested in making home-made bombs. The ammonium nitrate was being conveyed by the two women aboard a boat from nearby Tawao in Malaysia.

It is believed that the substance was one of the ingredients used to make the bombs that were detonated in the Bali bombings two years ago and many others.

The two women, Kate Basse, 44 and Hasnawati, 25, claimed they were from South Sulawesi, and initially told Nunukan customs officials that they intended to use it for fertilizer.

Each sack contains 50 kilograms of ammonium nitrate.

But, the customs officials suspected something, because the amount was far beyond normal. Another big clue for the astute customs officers was that the women did not have any documents from Malaysian authorities pertaining to the possession or export of the ammonium nitrate.

The officials then reported the two women to the police, who later took them into police custody.

Ince said that after a preliminary investigation, the two women admitted that they bought the chemicals from a trader in Tawao, Malaysia. But, they asserted that only 47 of the 62 sacks were going to be used by them.

"They refused to name the people who they were supposed to give the remaining sacks to," said Ince on Monday, adding that the police were still looking into the case and that the women had so far only been charged with smuggling.

Separately in Batam, some 2,000 employees at the Batam Authority's main offices became hysterical as they evacuated their workplace after a person contacted the office at 10 a.m and stated that there was a bomb planted on the fifth floor of the building.

The police bomb squad was called in and they combed the fifth floor for two hours, but they found nothing. It was the fifth reported bomb hoax received by the telephone operator in the building since 2001. When it happened, the chairman of Batam Authority, Ismeth Abdullah was not in the building.

Batam police were still looking into the case.