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Bali bomber boasts about his attacks

A key suspect in last year's Bali bombings told an Indonesian court yesterday he was proud of the attack that killed whites and that it served them right.

Amrozi, a 40-year-old mechanic, also said he had been involved in several bombings across Indonesia, including a blast outside the home of a Philippine diplomat in 2000 that killed two people.

Amrozi is charged with plotting, organizing and carrying out crimes of terror and causing mass casualties in the Oct. 12 Bali nightclub bombings that killed 202 people, most of them foreign tourists.

When asked how he felt about the impact of the Bali attack, Amrozi told the court: "There's some pride in my heart. For the white people, it serves them right."

Amrozi, testifying at his own trial for the first time, also said he was "more than remorseful" for the Balinese.

He said he had helped prepare explosives for the blast at the Manila envoy's Jakarta residence, bomb attacks in the eastern city of Ambon between 1999 and last year and also at various churches on Christmas Eve 2000.

He described how the bomb that exploded in a van outside the packed Sari Club in Bali had been given the code name "dodol," an Indonesian sweet.

"The car was brought here then it was laden with a bomb and it was destroyed," he said. "It was brought here for the purpose of bombing."

Wearing a black and white Muslim prayer cap and a white shirt, Amrozi appeared relaxed as he sat in the center of the courtroom and chuckled as he explained how he and alleged bomb plotter Imam Samudra referred to the bomb by its code name.

"We did not say bomb because we did not want others to know. Nobody should know about it, so how could we say bomb? We usually said we were delivering dodol," he said.

Samudra, a 33-year-old computer expert, told the court on Wednesday that he had come up with the idea of attacking the US and its allies but Amrozi had chosen Indonesia's famous tourist island as the target.

Amrozi, the first key suspect to go on trial over the Oct. 12 attacks, has been dubbed the laughing bomber by the media because of his behavior during the investigation.

The Bali attack was the worst since the Sept. 11 attacks on the US. Many officials suspect the Southeast Asian militant Islamic group Jemaah Islamiah was responsible. Indonesian police and some Asian and Western governments believe the Jemaah Islamiah is closely linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda.
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