Indonesia Arrests Four In Embassy Bombing
JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Indonesian police said Wednesday they had arrested four Muslim extremists involved in the Sept. 9 suicide truck bombing outside the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, marking the first breakthrough in the investigation.
Gen. Da'i Bachtiar, the national police chief, told reporters that the suspects included the chief planner, Iwan Darmawan, and two of those who made the bombs used in the attack, which killed 10 Indonesians.
The four men, suspected members of the Jemaah Islamiah underground, were caught on Indonesia's main island of Java. They were wearing explosives strapped to their waists at the time but did not have a chance to detonate them before they were arrested, Bachtiar said.
The Indonesian newspaper Kompas, meanwhile, reported that Indonesian police had repeatedly bungled the arrest of Jemaah Islamiah's chief bomb-maker. The newspaper said investigators had learned that Azahari bin Husin, a Malaysian militant, had been stopped three times by traffic police but that on each occasion he was not recognized and he paid a bribe to be released.
-- Alan Sipress
THE AMERICAS
• MEXICO CITY -- Police raided a town to search for members of an angry mob who lynched two officers a day earlier, but said they had been powerless to prevent the attack.
Witnesses and radio reports said about 1,000 federal and Mexico City police, carrying photographs of the alleged attackers caught on television the night before, had surrounded the town of San Juan Ixtayopan and were marching in groups from street to street. A police official said 17 people had been arrested.
Dozens of people beat and burned the two plainclothes undercover officers to death Tuesday night, thinking they were trying to abduct children from an elementary school.
• MANAGUA, Nicaragua -- Nicaragua destroyed 334 surface-to-air missiles it obtained from the Soviet Union in the 1980s, in keeping with a U.S. request that it scrap its missile stockpile, the army said.
THE MIDDLE EAST
• JERUSALEM -- Israel will allow international observers to monitor upcoming elections to replace Yasser Arafat as head of the Palestinian Authority, Israel's foreign minister said.
"If the international community will want to send observers, Israel will allow the entrance of observers," Silvan Shalom told Israel's Army Radio.
• JERUSALEM -- A Gaza-born Canadian citizen pleaded guilty to planning attacks on Israelis in North America and was sentenced by a military court to four years in prison, the Israeli army said. Jamal Akkal, 24, was arrested in Gaza on Nov. 1, 2003, and charged by the military with conspiring to commit manslaughter.
