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| Tuesday, 3 December 2002 |
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Key Bali suspect did not receive orders-lawyer JAKARTA, Monday (Reuters) The key suspect in the October 12 bombings on Indonesia's Bali island was the brains behind the deadly attack and was not ordered to do it, a lawyer for suspect Imam Samudra said on Monday. Lawyer Qadhar Faisal said his client, who police have said was the main plotter of the night club bombings that killed nearly 200 people, most of them foreign tourists, had confessed voluntarily to the attack. "From the beginning of the idea to the action, he confessed involvement. He admitted he supplied the idea and did not receive orders from someone else," Faisal told Reuters. Some Indonesian officials and police from other countries have said they believed international militant groups such as Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network and Southeast Asia's Jemaah Islamiah group were behind the bombings. Last week another lawyer for Samudra said his client had confessed to carrying out church bombings on the Indonesian island of Batam, near Singapore, in December 2000 with the help of a man known as Hambali. Some Western intelligence agents say Hambali is bin Laden's main man in Southeast Asia. But a senior Indonesian police official said last week Hambali had been replaced by another Indonesian as the operational leader of Jemaah Islamiah. Police have not made any connection between Hambali, whose whereabouts are not known, and the bombing in Bali's popular Kuta Beach night club strip. Police say they have arrested 15 Indonesian men in connection with the bombings -- the worst since last year's September 11 attacks on New York and Washington -- but it is unclear how many of them are directly implicated. Samudra is being held at national police headquarters in Jakarta and is due to be moved to Bali sometime this week for further questioning. Police captured the 35-year-old engineering graduate in the western Java province of Banten on November 21 and said he confessed involvement the following day to the bombings on the tourist island. Samudra faces the death penalty under new anti-terror regulations issued in the wake of the Bali attack. |
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