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Indonesian police said Thursday that a man they are interrogating admitted to planting a bomb in a Bali nightclub attack that killed nearly 200 people last month.
National Police Chief Da'i Bachtiar said the Indonesian man, identified only as Amrozi, was the owner of a minivan used in the Oct. 12 blast, adding that he "used the vehicle to carry out the bombing in Bali."
Bachtiar said Amrozi was formally declared a suspect in the case and remains in police custody.
"He (Amrozi) has disclosed many things and admitted his acts in Bali," Bachtiar said. "Therefore we are pursing his companions."
He did not elaborate. But other officers said the search for suspects was focusing on the eastern part of Indonesia's dominant island of Java, which is next to Bali.
Brig. Gen. Edward Aritonang, spokesman for a team of international investigators, said Amrozi was arrested in East Java province on Tuesday and then flown to Bali.
"The investigation team is still questioning him. There are many things that have to be cross-checked and be studied thoroughly," he said.
According to a local television report, Amrozi was arrested at an Islamic boarding school in the town of Tenggulun. The head of the school, Dzakaria, said in a TV interview that Amrozi also had attended a lecture at the school by radical Islamic cleric Abu Bakar Bashir.
Bashir, who is in police custody, is believed to be the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiyya, an Islamic militant network suspected of carrying out the Bali attack. No group has claimed responsibility for the bombing.
Amrozi "sometimes came to my school to conduct prayer with us," said Dzakaria, who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name. "He was not a student here."
Bashir is being held in a police hospital in Jakarta, and doctors said the 64-year-old cleric is too sick to be questioned. He has not been declared a suspect in the Bali blasts. He has denied any links with terrorists and said he won't cooperate with police.
Dzakaria said that Amrozi had worked in Malaysia during the 1990s, a time when Bashir was living there in exile during the dictatorship of Indonesia's former strongman Suharto. It remained unclear, however, whether the two men ever met in Malaysia.
Police have said the main bomb in the Oct. 12 attack - made with 110 to 220 pounds of explosives - was placed inside a Mitsubishi L300 minivan that was parked in front of one of the nightclubs.
Authorities have detained and questioned at least 20 people in the past two weeks because they resembled suspects depicted in three composite sketches released last week by police. Almost all were released without charges.
On Thursday, police issued the sketch of a fourth suspect.
About 120 detectives and intelligence officers from Australia, the United States, Britain, Japan and other countries are working on the case with Indonesian investigators.
(China Daily November 8, 2002)
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