November 11, 2002

The black marks of a bomb-maker

Eric Ellis, Denpasar

IT was the blackened smudge marks on the doors, floors and walls of the Denpasar apartment that most excited the eight-strong team of Australian Federal Police forensic scientists.
In a normal house, they could have been the usual filth that accumulates from dirty hands over a week's comings and goings in a suburban workshed.
But here in the suspected Kuta bomb factory, these smudges were far more sinister. They were certainly more extensive, blackening at waist height the door leading into the flat from the complex's main passage. Once inside the suspect flat, they smudged another internal door leading to the flat's second room.
Was it residue from the Sari Club bombs? Is this where Amrozi, the man who police allege has confessed to the October 12 attacks, worked and slept? The grim, clean-suited AFP team and their associate from London's Scotland Yard weren't saying or even speculating, except to confirm this was now a crime scene.
In the first room of the suspect apartment, a thin single mattress lay on the floor, taking up about half the floor space. Next to it were empty water cooler bottles. They too had suspicious smudge marks about them.
The walls were white but filthy with more scuffs and smudges. There clearly had been a lot of activity.
Australian and British investigators may have been present but the "crime scene" had an Indonesian langour about it. Once word had buzzed around from loose-lipped local officials as to where the suspected bomb factory was, locals could walk into the complex from the street and up to the floor where investigators were working. The suspicious rooms were sectioned off with "Do not cross" police tape, but the cordons were straining against the increasing ebb and flow of sightseers.
The flat seemed an unlikely terrorist's lair. This was no cave in Afghanistan or even a hardline Islamist madrassa.
The apartment is in an upmarket block of five floors in Denpasar's leafier suburbs, no more than 1km from the Australian and US consulates. It rents for about $100 a month, expensive by Balinese standards.
The apartment being picked over by AFP investigators is on the second storey, comprising about a quarter of the floor. The complex is opposite Denpasar's Bhakti Rahayu clinic, an upmarket facility patronised by Bali's elite.
It was to Bhakti Rahayu on October 12-13 that many victims of the Sari Club bombings were ferried for treatment in the frantic hours after the terrorists attacked.
According to clinic officials, the apartments in the complex are rented but also are often used as an annexe to the clinic and, bleached white, have a hospital feel about them. On the ground floor are storerooms laden with medical equipment; test tubes, surgical implements and the like.
Outside, a crowd gathered for drinks and cigarettes in the hot Balinese sun at a warung, a typical shop in a rickety streetside lean-to.
The warung's proprietor, 46-year-old Ibu "Mother" Tusti, "kept an eye" on the neighbourhood, which she said was a mixture of Balinese Hindus, some Christians and, increasingly, Muslims from outside Bali. There is no mosque in the immediate area.
Ibu Tusti said she never noticed anything particularly unusual about the complex she shared with her warung, except that in the weeks before the October 12 bombing, "there were more cars and trucks in the street".
More Muslims from outside Bali had been evident in the neighbourhood in the past year.
She said she noticed that the occupants of the building would rarely leave the complex during the day, but would venture out at night. She did not recognise Amrozi, the man investigators say has confessed to making the bombs and who led them to this house.