Indonesian Police Seize Bomb-making Materials in Raid

By ALI KOTARUMALOS / AP WRITER

JAKARTA — Anti-terrorism police seized bomb-making materials and a large cache of weapons and ammunition during a raid Tuesday on a house in the Indonesian capital, police and a local television station reported.

The man who was renting the home in Plumpang, a neighborhood in north Jakarta, escaped before police arrived but the owner has been taken in for questioning, TVOne said, quoting unnamed security officials.

A bomb-making manual, pipes, cables and chemicals were among the items recovered, one anti-terrorism official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

"We also found weapons and a wide range of ammunition," he said.

Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, has been hit in recent years by a string of suicide bombings that have killed more than 240 people. The regional terror group Jemaah Islamiyah has been blamed for those attacks.

The last bombing occurred on the island of Bali in late 2005. Earlier this year, the United States lifted a travel warning imposed in 2000, citing improvements in security.

Meanwhile a top Indonesian court rejected a claim by three convicted Bali bombers that the constitution prohibits deaths by firing squad, clearing the way for their executions.

The Constitutional Court dismissed their request to be beheaded instead, which they claim is more in line with Islamic law and their defense lawyers argued is less cruel than being shot to death.

"There is no method of execution without pain," said presiding Judge Mohammad Mahfud, outlining the decision.

The defendant's suffering is a logical consequence of the death penalty under Indonesian law and "cannot be categorized as torturing the convict," the nine judge panel concluded.

The October 2002 Bali nightclub bombings killed 202 people, 88 of them Australian tourists.

Convicts Amrozi Nurhasyim, Ali Gufron and Imam Samudra have exhausted all appeals and are expected to be executed this year. They have shown no remorse and have said their deaths would be avenged.

The bombings—carried out by the regional militant group Jemaah Islamiyah—thrust Southeast Asia onto the front line of the war on terror.

Indonesia has since suffered three smaller attacks, the last also on Bali in 2005, but foreign diplomats, analysts and authorities agree that the threat level is significantly lower today.