FIVE terrorism suspects shot dead by Indonesian police late on Sunday
spent days staying in a guest house next to a popular Australian-run
bar in Bali drawing up plans of the venue and apparently plotting an
attack.
Police said they had found diagrams of the bar, La Vida Loca, on the popular Seminyak tourist strip, in the men's possession.
A national police spokesman, Saud Usman Nasution,
suggested the men were planning to rob two shops and blow up the bar,
but other sources said La Vida Loca was more likely to be a target for a
robbery than a terrorist attack.
Others from the group were still at large, said a senior
counter-terrorism official, Petrus Golose, who told a national
parliamentary committee that the dead men were part of a much broader
network.
''This group is a dangerous group and they have [an organisational] structure in various provinces [of Indonesia],'' he said.
The organisation consisted of several teams, including
one to carry out the crimes and another to organise the escape, he
said, and ''[we] haven't [been able to] seize these teams''.
Drawings found at the hotels where the men were shot by
police on Sunday night showed they were hoping either to rob or bomb a
number of businesses including, La Vida Loca, the PT Bali Money
Changer, in Kuta, and a jeweller in the district of Jimbaran, Mr
Nasution said.
The men were shot by police from the crack anti-terrorism
squad, Detachment 88, in two Bali locations about 15 kilometres apart.
Three died in a hotel in the resort suburb of Sanur and two in
Denpasar.
Mr Nasution said the men were killed in a firefight with police who were trying to arrest them.
But a witness quoted on the Indonesian website Tempo last
night said she had seen police arrive with two handcuffed men at a
bungalow in Sanur. She heard screams about surrender before three
shots were fired.
''I thought it was firecrackers but it was very loud,'' said the woman, named ''Rina'' by the website.
Detachment 88, formed after the 2002 Bali bombings, has now shot and killed 56 suspects in its short but bloody history.
Mr Nasution said the five plotters were engaged in
robbery to fund jihad, or Islamic holy war. Police had found two
pistols and two magazines of ammunition with 48 rounds and a mask in
the hotel rooms, but there were no explosives.
Asked about this, Mr Nasution said the robberies were
intended to fund the purchase of explosives. ''Do you rob a cafe? You
explode it,'' he said.
Asked if foreigners were the targets, he said: ''The cafes in Bali are always frequented by foreigners.''
La Vida Loca, run by an Australian called George who did
not want his surname published, is billed on local websites as offering
a ''crazy night of full-on party mayhem'' with ''no shortage of party
girls and glam ladyboys''.
George said police had called six or more local bar
owners together on Friday night to warn them they were targets of a
group involved in a set of armed robberies in 2010, and a recent
bungled pipe-bomb attack at a construction site in Semarang, Java.
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