Small slip helps Bali case unfold

Late last week, Indonesian and Australian police investigating the Bali bombing stumbled across the break they were hoping for: an act of naiveté by one of the bombers.

His error has led to four arrests in Indonesia and given almost certain proof of Al Qaeda's involvement in the attack.

Indonesian police now know the identities of up to a dozen men with ties to last month's bombing who are still inside Indonesia, and 10 more who are believed to have fled the country through Malaysia. Most of those men are Indonesian, but a domestic investigator said there are some "foreign actors" among them.

The hunt for those men is likely to spread across Southeast Asia, with national police and foreign investigators saying indications are that the attack was planned in at least three regional countries – Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.

But tracking down the men who are already outside the country, investigators warn, will prove a more difficult task than apprehending the relatively less important foot soldiers who stayed behind. The key, they say, will be intelligence-sharing between the governments of Southeast Asia, who have pledged to work together more closely in the wake of criticism that they are unable to cooperate.

The tipoff came from a man named Amrozi, who, like many Indonesians, has only one name. An intensely religious mechanic from the tiny East Java village of Tenggulun, he was arrested last Tuesday at a ramshackle Islamic boarding school run by his older brother.

About five months ago, Mr. Amrozi bought a white Mitzubishi minivan; at home, he popped the hood and filed off the engine's serial number. On Oct. 12, a sophisticated 150-pound bomb detonated inside the van, killing about 200 people – most of them Australian tourists dancing at the Sari Club.

"It would have been much smarter for them to use a stolen car,'' says Prasetiyo (his full name), a spokesman for the Indonesian national police. He says that Australian police, working with Indonesian investigators, were able to discern the car's serial number. Once they had that, it was a simple matter to track down the owner.

Confronted with that evidence – and receipts proving he had purchased a ton of the volatile chemical ammonium chlorate from a store in the East Javan city of Surabaya – Amrozi confessed his involvement. "He was used as an advance man,'' says Mr. Prasetiyo. "He bought the chemicals, he got a car, he rented the apartment they used to get ready in Bali."

The head of the international investigating team, police Maj. Gen. I Made Mangku Pastika, said that Amrozi has admitted to buying the car and participating in the attack. His main target was Americans, Mr. Pastika told a press conference in Bali yesterday. "He thought many Americans were in Bali. When he knew mostly Australians died he was not happy.''

Indonesian investigators say they're now very close to conclusively tying the attack to Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a tightly knit regional terrorist group that works with Al Qaeda and has been linked to a string of attacks in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia over the past three years.

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