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Indonesian Bomb Expert Concludes Azahari, Top Behind 1 October Attack

Posted on: Wednesday, 5 October 2005, 06:00 CDT

On 3 Oct 05, Banjarmasin Post online carried an opinion piece by Dr Hermawan Sulistyo, a member of the 2002 Bali bombing assistance team, entitled "Still the same old perpetrators".

Sulistyo emphasized that, although a lot of luck was also involved, the investigation should not be as difficult or as slow this time due to experience, more sophisticated technical forensic equipment, and lessons learnt from the first Bali bombing.

He rejected the idea that the bombings were linked to fuel price increases, saying that the policy had been introduced relatively recently and the bombing could not have organized in the short space of time since the announcement. He also rejected the suggestion that members of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) could have been responsible, saying that they had never carried out actions so far from their base, and there is no history of suicide bombings in Aceh. Apart from this, with the recently signed MoU with the Indonesian government, GAM has achieved some of their goals and has no reason to carry out such an attack. Sulistyo also said that he did not believe that certain elements of the military were behind the bombings.

Therefore he thought that it was likely that Azahari and Noordin M. Top were the masterminds of the 1 October attack and that their motive was the same as before, namely anti-US sentiment and support for Palestinian independence.

Sulistyo thought that the bomb was of a much lower grade of explosive than the first Bali bombing and that it was possibly made from organic materials 'from the military', such as TNT or RDX. He said that for those with connections it would not be hard to trace this on the black market.

Sulistyo predicted that there would definitely be similar incidents in the future, with the locations being chosen based on lax security and for their symbolism and the implications in the sense of being places where there were large numbers of "certain people", i.e. certain foreigners.

He made four recommendations:

That the police further limit access to explosive materials, although he acknowledged that one possible reason for the low explosive power of the latest bombs was the increasing difficulty of easy access to high powered explosive materials. There needs to be increased cooperation with those selling chemical materials, and increased coordination within the police force itself. Increased "outsourcing" by police for expert advice and input into investigations, for instance academic expertise on DNA. However, he said that the police seemed resistant to such a practice. That the police needed to institute a constant public campaign against terrorism emphasizing the cost from victims' perspectives.

Source: BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific

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