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Uncovering the bombers' secrets

November 17 2002
By Wayne Miller and Darren Goodsir

The laborious, but critical, task of verifying alleged Bali bomber Amrozi's confession - and linking his cohorts to the explosions - is taking place in a hotel room converted into the Australian Federal Police's offshore forensic laboratory.

Here, the nation's top scientists are slowly, but assiduously, unlocking the secrets that will show exactly how a gang of more than 10 Indonesian men - led by Amrozi's religious mentor, Imam Samudra - allegedly plotted and schemed, and then planted the bombs.

In the "clean room", officers dressed in white anti-contamination suits shuffle between tables and computers, testing material picked up from near the Sari Club and Paddy's Irish pub, and the cars, bikes, houses and dormitories that the terrorists used, or stayed at, in the weeks before the attacks.

Leading the "exhilarating, but exhausting" task is AFP agent David Royds, who said yesterday the multinational pursuit of the Bali bombers had been revelatory.

"It's been an absolute privilege to work with scientists from the UK, FBI, Australia, Indonesia, and to see everybody just working together with so much energy and so much drive - all pursuing the same end result," he said.

"We've got things of interest from the size of motorcars, right down to things that would be absolutely impossible to see with the naked eye. There's no such thing as luck in this exercise.

"If you look long enough and hard enough, you will find traces.

"The people who have done this are either very, very clever scientists or dills who have followed a prescription very, very closely."

In the spirit of the joint Indonesian-Australian investigation, Operation Alliance, material is being tested simultaneously at three locations, including the Forensics Explosives Laboratory in Britain. The checks ensure results are infallible.

Mr Royds said the most useful evidence had been taken from the scene of the third blast - a relatively small explosion near the United States and Australian consulates in Renon, near Denpasar. The huge "fertiliser bomb" that tore apart the Sari Club was a more potent "pyrotechnic mixture", the destructive force of which has complicated residue collection.

For days after the October 12 attacks, teams of scientists and technicians climbed telegraph poles and roofs looking for residue unaffected by water used to douse the flames.

"At the end of the day, you have many, many thousands of pieces of this jigsaw puzzle," Mr Royds said. "Now it is a matter of us putting it all together to make the whole picture, and I think we are progressing extremely well."

Assisting the investigation is Tasmanian police inspector John Bird, the head of the disaster victim identification process that has verified 62 Australian victims.

Indonesian authorities have identified three more Australians. They are Rebecca Marie Cartledge, 20, Dimitra Kotronakis, 27, and Matthew Lucas Bolwerk, 27.



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