INDONESIA: Indonesian police released photos of the reconstructed head of a suspected suicide bomber yesterday whom they believe blew up a luxury Jakarta hotel when he drove a car full of explosives and fuel into the courtyard.
The grisly photos showed the badly disfigured and bloodied face of a man dubbed Mr X by police. The police also disclosed that they had arrested two men over a bomb attack on parliament last month but had yet to make an arrest over the Marriott atrocity.
Since the Tuesday bombing at the US-run Marriott that killed 10 people and wounded 150, most attention has focused on Jemaah Islamiah, a shadowy southeast Asian Muslim network linked to al-Qaeda and blamed for last October's Bali bomb attacks.
But police denied earlier reports they had identified the driver.
"Our initial belief is this head came from the car based on information from witnesses. We have called him Mr X because from 10 victims there is one that cannot be identified, namely this head," Mr Erwin Mappaseng, head of the criminal investigation department, told reporters.
Police said the man had defining features, such as a small goatee beard and a mole on the right side of his neck.
Mr Mappaseng said they would use DNA to try to identify him.
Investigators have highlighted similarities between Tuesday's bomb and the October 12th Bali nightclub bombings, which killed 202 people. A court in Bali delivered the first verdict in trials over that atrocity yesterday, sentencing a Muslim militant called Amrozi to death.
Other officers said investigators were also hunting for further clues to the nature of the Marriott bomb.
"We're still digging for residue of the explosive materials," a Jakarta police spokesman said.
Police also denied suggestions that the car driver expressed a desire to be a suicide bomber six weeks earlier in a coded email using an expression favoured by members of that group.
Senior police officer Mr Gorris Mere told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio that investigators had recovered a hand and blood samples from the scene.
"We bring it back to compare with the hand found on the crime scene and also with the blood we found on the crime scene," he told the radio station in a telephone interview.
Mr Mere named the suspect as Asmal and said he had expressed a desire in an email "to get married" and that this was a code used by JI members when they wanted to take part in a suicide bombing.
Mr Mappaseng said Mr Mere had denied speaking to reporters, adding there might have been a misunderstanding. He declined to specifically answer questions about the email.
Asked about reports that a hotel security camera had captured the bloody saga on film, Mr Mappaseng said it did not capture footage of the vehicle, just the effects of the explosion.