| Submit your comments on this article |
| Southeast Asia |
| Indonesia releases sketches of hotel bombers |
| 2009-07-24 |
| [Al Arabiya Latest] Indonesian police released digital images Wednesday of the reconstructed faces of two suspected suicide bombers thought to have attacked luxury hotels in Jakarta last week, killing seven people. Police said the suspected bomber who killed six people including five foreigners at the JW Marriott was aged only 16 to 17 years old, while the man suspected of carrying out the Ritz-Carlton attack was aged from 20 to 40 years. The images are being shown to witnesses as part of the investigation into Friday's attacks on the luxury hotels in central Jakarta, the first major terror attack in Indonesia since 2005. The images were based on two severed heads found at the blast sites which are believed to be those of the bombers, suspected members of the Jemaah Islamiyah regional extremist network or one of its offshoots. "We found two severed heads on location and we can confirm that they are the suspected suicide bombers," police spokesman Nanan Soekarna told a press conference. The men had short hair and looked Asian in appearance. The Marriott bomber was described as being 16 to 17 years old, fair-skinned and 180-190 centimeters (5'9"-6'3") tall. The Ritz-Carlton bomber was a chubby-faced, dark-skinned man, who police said was between 20 and 40 and was about 165 cm in height, with short, straight black hair. Negative DNA results However as police struggled to identify the bombers, Soekarna said DNA tests on the families of two men suspected of carrying out the attacks, named as Ibrahim and Nur Hasbi, had returned negative results. "The DNA of the families have not matched the body parts that we have found," Soekarna said. "Concerning Ibrahim, we've done a DNA test and it's not identical. Also (this is the case) for Nur Hasbi," he said. He said the sketches also did not match Ibrahim or Nur Hasbi, also known as Nur Said, who is a reported associate of alleged terror mastermind Noordin Mohammed Top. But police did not explicitly rule out either man as suspects in the wider investigation into the attacks, which have rattled the foreign business and diplomatic community in Indonesia. Jemaah Islamiyah splinter group Indonesian counter-terrorist police commandos secure the Ritz-CarltonSenior counterterrorism officials and police have said the attacks look very much like the work of Noordin, the Malaysian-born leader of a Jemaah Islamiyah splinter group. The bombers checked in to the Marriott as paying guests on July 15 and assembled the bombs in room 1808 on the 18th floor, according to police. A third bomb, found in a laptop computer bag, was defused. The victims at the Marriott were attending a weekly meeting of some of Indonesia's most prominent foreign business executives in a room to the side of the main lobby. A police source told Reuters on Monday that one theory the police are working on is that the bombers planned to detonate the bomb on the 18th floor first, sending panicking guests rushing down to the lobby where one of the suicide bombers would detonate a second bomb, potentially killing and injuring many more guests. |
| Posted by:Fred |