How Police Turned Bali Blast
Into Win in War on Terrorism
Largely Hobbled Network
By LESLIE LOPEZ and JOHN MCBETH
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
DENPASAR, Indonesia -- One of Indonesia's top detectives was deeply troubled last November as he scaled the staircase to Bali's biggest Hindu temple to implore the gods.
Three weeks earlier, Muslim militants had detonated two bombs on the resort island's nightclub strip, reducing an entire city block to smoking rubble and killing 202 people, 80 of them Australian tourists. It was the biggest terrorist strike since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S., and the police were feeling the heat.
The detective tasked to lead a joint Indonesian and Australian investigation into the blast, I Made Pastika, was making little progress. While his lieutenants sifted through debris from the bombing site, Mr. Pastika, a soft-spoken 52-year-old Hindu who grew up in Bali, went to pray for a breakthrough. "I had a feeling we were missing something," he says.
After an hour of meditation, Mr. Pastika received an urgent call from a colleague: His team had identified the serial number of the engine in the truck used to carry a one-ton bomb. "I don't know how we missed it before," he says.
Two days later, he arrested his first suspect, an Indonesian man named Amrozi. The big break led to more than just the uncovering of the Bali bomb plot. It also helped police largely hobble Southeast Asia's most deadly terrorist group. And it propelled Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, from what the U.S. saw as the region's weakest link in the war on terror to a valued ally.
This transformation over a matter of weeks came about partly because Indonesia's political leaders set aside their traditionally strong sense of nationalism to allow ordinary policemen to go about their work. And those policemen, under the leadership of Mr. Pastika and his partner, Australian Federal Police officer Graham Ashton, transcended religious and cultural differences to deliver a powerful blow against terrorism.
The account of how the transformation occurred comes from intelligence officers across the region, many of whom asked for anonymity to protect themselves and their families.
Within weeks of Mr. Amrozi's arrest, Indonesia's much-maligned police force would confer with seismic experts monitoring Bali's live volcano to confirm the exact time of the explosions. They also turned to telecommunications experts from the Australian police force to help round up Mr. Amrozi's accomplices and arrest dozens more home-grown militants. Among them was Abu Bakar Baasyir, a white-haired Islamic cleric alleged to be the leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, the al Qaeda-linked group to which Mr. Amrozi belonged.
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, Indonesia had been slow to respond to U.S. calls for help in the war on terrorism. Neighboring Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines cracked down hard on Southeast Asia's Muslim extremists. But Indonesian leaders insisted their country was free of them, despite evidence that Jemaah Islamiyah used the country as its base in a terrorist campaign to unite Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines in a single Islamic state.
"It was a nightmare. After [Sept. 11] we showed them intelligence that their backyard was where [Jemaah Islamiyah] was hiding, but the Indonesians didn't lift a finger," says a senior Southeast Asian intelligence official. "But after Bali, everything changed. Jemaah Islamiyah is on the run and it is because the Indonesians have gotten serious."
The tough police work has "severely crippled Jemaah Islamiyah, but they are still in business," says Ralph Boyce, the U.S. ambassador to Indonesia. He says key leaders of the group, such as Riduan Isamuddin, who is better known as Hambali, remain at large. On May 16, for example, Thai police arrested a Singaporean member of the group who some regional intelligence officials believe was part of a group of terrorists plotting to bomb several embassies in Bangkok. "We know that Jemaah Islamiyah has the means and motivation to strike again," Mr. Boyce says.
The investigation began shortly after an explosion tore through the tightly packed Sari nightclub just before midnight on Oct. 12. President Megawati Sukarnoputri hastily convened a meeting the next day with her security advisers to discuss her government's options. People familiar with the meeting say national police chief Da'i Bachtiar forcefully argued that Jakarta had to come down hard on extremist elements even at the risk of upsetting its dominant Muslim community.
"His message was that if Indonesia kept quiet, it could kiss the economy goodbye. Tourism was the only bright spot and that was just killed," says a senior Western diplomat familiar with the meeting. Ms. Megawati agreed, the diplomat says.
In Canberra, Australian officials were grappling with a national tragedy. They needed someone trustworthy to run the ground operations in Bali. The lanky and gregarious Mr. Ashton, a 41-year-old with more than 20 years' experience in the police, fit the bill. Mr. Ashton worked in Jakarta between 1995 and 1997 as the police force's chief liaison handling everything from pedophilia to money laundering. "He had the relationships, he was a Bahasa [Indonesian] speaker and he had the seniority," says Mick Keelty, chief of Australia's national police force.
Jakarta showed it was serious about investigating the Bali bombings by appointing Mr. Pastika. Before the Bali bombings, the detective had solved the murder of a separatist leader in the easternmost province of Papua. His work resulted in the arrest of several members of Indonesia's politically powerful military.
U.S. security officials had long known of Mr. Pastika's work. They remember him as a budding police investigator who played a key role in the capture of a Japanese Red Army terrorist responsible for the 1986 bomb attacks on the U.S., Japanese and Canadian embassies in Jakarta. Mr. Pastika picked up the fingerprints of a terrorist known as Tsutomo Shirosaki from strips of adhesive tape, which the bomber had used to fasten a Ritz chocolate tin can to a homemade rocket launcher. Mr. Pastika's efforts helped the U.S. nab Mr. Shirosaki in Nepal 10 years after the bombings.
By quickly taking charge of the investigation, the Indonesian detective ironed out the initial chaos among members of two very different police forces and simultaneously quelled rising political temperatures in Jakarta over the presence of foreign security personnel on Indonesian soil. Mr. Ashton also helped by giving Mr. Pastika space and not trying to upstage him, says a regional intelligence official involved in the Bali investigation.
Leads came quickly but were inconclusive. Then, 15 days into the investigation, the joint investigation team was finally able to piece together the chassis of the Mitsubishi L-300 van used to blow up the nightclub. Fragments of the van were flung over a 200-yard radius. Forensic specialists were looking for the serial number that should have been etched into the engine block. "We tried to restore the numbers but couldn't. We thought we were out of work," Mr. Ashton says. Dejected, he returned to Canberra for meetings with his bosses.
Mr. Pastika repaired to Bali's ornate Hindu temple, while his men continued to sift through the charred wreckage. At last, they managed to pick out a serial number, DPR15463, hidden behind a piece of metal scorched onto the engine.
After an exhaustive search through stacks of car-registration files, police traced the van through six owners. The last owner told police that he had sold the vehicle to a man named Amrozi in Lamongan, a small district in northeast Java. Suspicions were raised among intelligence officials involved in the manhunt because Mr. Amrozi wanted to buy a car with Bali license plates. He also paid for it in U.S. dollars and Malaysian ringgit. Intelligence officials say it is rare for someone in a small town to have large amounts of foreign currency.
Two days later, on Nov. 4, Mr. Amrozi's house was under surveillance. The next day, Mr. Pastika ordered his field team to move in. Investigators brushed past Mr. Amrozi's mother and found him asleep in bed, according to one investigator involved in the raids. The investigator says that when Mr. Amrozi woke up, "He was very easygoing. He said 'What's going on?' -- and then he laughed. He laughs all the time."
Among the evidence found at Mr. Amrozi's house were receipts for the purchase of potassium chlorate and sulphur, two of the ingredients used in the bombing. More important, investigators also uncovered a list of mobile-phone numbers, some of which had been used in Bali at the time of the bombing.
The list proved crucial in the cat-and-mouse game investigators would play with the suspects. Investigators say that when Mr. Amrozi's arrest was announced on Nov. 7, they listened in as the people using the numbers contacted each other in a flurry of urgent calls from positions scattered across Java, Indonesia's main island. Then, the phones fell silent.
Investigators say they later learned that members of Jemaah Islamiyah were repeatedly warned to cut down on cellphone use. But the phones still helped nab several suspects.
In one episode, the Indonesian-Australian task force tracked a suspect to a small village in central Java. The setting would normally provide ample opportunity for a suspect to disappear. So cops fanned out all over the village. Then they tried a simple trick: An investigator called the cellphone number of the suspect. "When the phone of a young man standing beside an undercover policeman started to ring, we got him," says an official involved in the case.
But after Mr. Amrozi's arrest, the main quarry was the man police believed was the mastermind behind the Bali attacks: Imam Samudra.
Mr. Imam had stopped using the cellphone number that investigators had recovered from Mr. Amrozi's apartment. Then, in mid-November, police intercepted an e-mail message sent from one of the many Internet cafes Mr. Imam frequented. It gave away his new mobile-phone number. And when he began using that phone, police were waiting for him. Australian telecommunications experts tracked his mobile-phone signal to the port city of Merak, on the western island of Sumatra. Then the signal vanished.
Concerned that Mr. Imam was planning his escape from Indonesia, Messrs. Pastika and Ashton decided to flood Merak with more than 30 detectives, some manning checkpoints and others searching departing ferries. While they were checking a bus, one of the Indonesian officers noticed a man in the rear seat who had slipped his cap lower down over his face. Within seconds, the struggling Mr. Imam was dragged from the bus and rushed to Jakarta for interrogation.
In the hours that followed, Mr. Imam confessed his role in the Bali bombings, investigators say, but he refused to talk about Jemaah Islamiyah, as have many other Bali suspects. Still, Mr. Imam's fall was a satisfying moment for Mr. Pastika's team.
"Imam thought the Indonesian police couldn't touch him. In one of the messages sent on his laptop, he said God would close our eyes," says a policeman involved in his capture. "But we didn't have any doubt we would catch these guys."
As the Bali investigation widened over the next several months, Jemaah Islamiyah was close to panicking. A Jemaah Islamiyah lieutenant arrested in April told his captors that he attended a late-night crisis meeting near Jakarta, according to documents seen by The Wall Street Journal. The lieutenant, Nasir Abbas, said Jemaah Islamiyah members were again warned to limit the use of their mobile phones. Abu Rusdan, who had taken over the leadership of the group after the arrest of Mr. Baasyir within weeks of the bombing, proposed staging a daring rescue of Mr. Baasyir. But he was shouted down by others, who were afraid of being captured themselves.
Many of those attending the April crisis meeting were later arrested.
Still, there were miscues. In late April, investigators captured a Jemaah Islamiyah member known as Rusdi in the town of Pekanbaru on Sumatra. They would later find during the interrogation of Mr. Rusdi that walking several meters behind Mr. Rusdi when he was arrested was Azahari Husin, a Malaysian lecturer and one of two key Jemaah Islamiyah bomb-makers who remains at large. "He had cut his hair and the field agents didn't recognize him," says an official familiar with the incident.
Mr. Pastika was appointed Bali police chief earlier this year. He spends much of his time monitoring the trials against the Bali bombers, who face the death penalty if found guilty. Mr. Baasyir is being tried for insurrection in Jakarta.
"We've done our part by bringing them to trial," Mr. Pastika says. "What we now need is a guilty verdict and a strong sentence to show that the Indonesian system doesn't tolerate terrorism."
-- James Hookway in Manila contributed to this article.
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