Jakarta – Separatist guerillas from Indonesia's restive Aceh province on Friday denied involvement in a Jakarta bomb blast as police found a third body at the scene.
"GAM [Free Aceh Movement] had no involvement in [Thursday's] blast. Our operations are focused on Aceh and fighting the Indonesian soldiers and police sent here," GAM operations commander, Amri Din Abdul Wahab, told AFP. "We are not interested in creating violence in other countries."
The bomb exploded on Thursday afternoon in a small house for Acehnese students in a residential area of south Jakarta, killing three people, injuring two others and causing heavy damage to the house. The third body was discovered on Friday afternoon by forensics officers combing the blast site for evidence, Jakarta police spokesman Senior Commissioner Anton Bachrul Alam told AFP.
President Abdurrahman Wahid described the blast as an "effort by groups trying to pit GAM against the TNI [Indonesian armed forces] and to diminish the government's credibility." Earlier bomb squad experts had discovered and removed a second bomb from the scene, taking it to their Jakarta headquarters for detonation.
Police have declared nine suspects, including the two victims and three people who fled the scene, Alam said. Four suspects were detained at the city police headquarters on Friday, out of 11 people held for questioning since late Thursday, Alam told AFP. The three missing suspects have been declared fugitives.
"The nine suspects are charged with involvement in the explosion and of protecting the activities of people in possession of dangerous materials," he said.
The majority of the suspects were Acehnese, Alam said, but stopped short of accusing them of belonging to the GAM rebels. "Not GAM, but they do have a connection with SIRA," Alam said, referring to a student activists' network campaigning for a referendum on self-determination in Aceh.
GAM's Wahab called the blast a deliberate attempt to create fear and terror among Acehnese students, but he stopped short of blaming anyone. "It was a deliberate explosion to create a fear of Acehnese students who live there, and to terrorise students from Aceh because they have held demonstrations protesting against human rights abuses in Aceh," he said.
"However we don't have any evidence yet so we don't want to point fingers." Alam said forensics experts were still analysing the substance of both bombs. "What we know so far is that it was a high powered bomb," he added.
Police forensics chief, Senior Commissioner Marsudhi speculated that "one of the two victims may have been assembling both bombs" when one accidentally went off.
"We have not yet concluded our investigation but based on the shrapnel and the extensive damage to the victims' body, he might have been making the bombs while the other victim was sleeping." "The first bomb was highly explosive because it threw the sleeping victim out of the room into the empty garden next to the house," Alam said.
A second blast Thursday in Depok, a suburb southeast of Jakarta caused by a suspected parcel bomb, occurred half an hour after the first, but no one was injured and no serious damage caused, police said.
Jakarta was the focus of a series of bomb explosions in Indonesia last year, including a near-simultaneous round of explosions on Christmas Eve at Christian churches across the archipelago, in which 19 people were killed.