JAKARTA, 7 August 2003 — Indonesian police released yesterday a sketch of a suspect in the bombing of a US-run luxury hotel in Jakarta and said the device resembled those used in attacks blamed on the shadowy Jemaah Islamiyah group and was triggered by a mobile phone.
Tuesday’s suicide car bomb attack, two days before the first Bali bomb trial verdict and after a spate of global terror warnings, killed 10 people and wounded 150 at Jakarta’s five-star JW Marriott Hotel. Police revised the death toll down from 16.
The Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) militant Muslim organization, widely blamed for the Bali attack and linked to Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network, had claimed responsibility for the latest blast, Singapore’s Straits Times reported.
Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said he was worried about more violence within days in Indonesia.
“I think the world should know that what we are facing is an international terrorist organization, it is not a domestic terrorist cell,” Chief Security Minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said.
Erwin Mappaseng, head of the criminal investigation department, released composite sketches of a man who bought the car into which a deadly cocktail of black powder and TNT wedged between cans filled with petrol was packed. A police caption on one sketch described the man as a suspected bomber.
“On the detonation method, it was known that the bomb was triggered by a mobile phone,” he told a news conference. “We have not determined whether JI was involved.”
