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Indonesian police miss suspect

Police questioned more witnesses in the Bali backpack bombings yesterday after narrowly failing to capture a key suspect in a series of blasts in Indonesia over the past several years.

The death toll from the blasts one week ago has risen to 23 -- including the three suicide bombers who strolled into packed restaurants on the Indonesian island with explosives hidden in backpacks, police said.

A 20-year-old restaurant worker died late on Friday of internal bleeding said Wayan Sutarga, medical services director at Sanglah hospital in Denpasar. He was the 15th Indonesian victim of the blasts, which also killed four Australians and a Japanese and wounded 146.

Police have questioned a total of 152 witnesses over the past week in connection with the blasts, but no one has been arrested or charged, Soenarko Dhanu Artanto, National Police deputy spokesman told reporters yesterday.

Police narrowly missed catching Noordin Top, 35, during a pre-dawn raid in the central Java village of Purwantoro, Abdul Madjid, police chief in the city of Solo, told reporters late on Friday.

Noordin and fellow Malaysian Azahari bin Husin, identified by police and intelligence officials as leaders of the al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiah (JI) militant network, are leading targets of the search for those with possible ties to the Bali blasts.

But the two Malaysians have kept one step ahead of a massive hunt for years, moving constantly in densely populated areas of this sprawling nation of 220 million people and more than 10,000 islands.

JI seeks to create an Islamic state across broad swathes of Muslim Southeast Asia, experts say.

Madjid said police had information Noordin visited Bali near the time of the bombings, but it wasn't clear whether he was there when the blasts occurred.

A US trained anti-terror force called Detachment 88 took part in the raids, he said.

Police helicopters yesterday dropped thousands of leaflets with pictures of Top and Noordin on traditional markets throughout central Java. The leaflets said: "These are dangerous terrorists! If you see them, please report to the nearest police."

The two Malaysians were implicated in bombings in Bali three years ago that killed 202 people, and subsequent deadly attacks on a luxury hotel in Jakarta in 2003 and outside the Australian embassy in the Indonesian capital last year.

The US announced this week it was offering rewards of US$10 million and US$1 million respectively for information leading to the capture of Dulmatin and Umar Patek, two suspects in the 2002 Bali bombings.

The State Department said both were JI members and Dulmatin was an electronics specialist who had trained at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.

Some police and experts say JI in its original form was largely destroyed by arrests and convictions after earlier attacks, and the group behind the latest attacks may be a new Islamic militant organization or a violent offshoot of JI.

Most Muslims in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, are moderate but militancy has grown in recent years.

Meanwhile, Central Java's Police Chief Major General Chairul Rasyid said authorities were close to identifying two of the three suicide bombers.

He also revealed that the wife of another top terror suspect -- Zulkarnaen -- made phone calls to the island days before the strike.

"Three days before the bombings last week, his wife made several phone calls to Bali," Madjid told reporters. "We have given the phone numbers that she contacted to the Bali police for them to trace them."

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