Book Extract: Key clue in Bali nightclub bombing revealed
In this exclusive extract from crime writer Liz Porter’s new book Crime Scene Asia she details how forensic scientists proved a suicide bomber had attacked a Bali nightclub.
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Shortly before midnight on Saturday October 12, 2002, two bombs tore through the heart of the Kuta Beach tourist precinct on the Indonesian island of Bali.
The first blast went off at 11.07 pm in Paddy’s Bar. Less than a minute later, a second, far bigger explosion created a deadly inferno in the thatch-roofed Sari Club bar, just metres away on the other side of the Legian Road nightclub strip.
Forty-five seconds later a third bomb was detonated some 12 km away in Renon, on a deserted roadside between the US consulate and the Australian consulates.
The death toll was 202, with a further 209 people horribly injured.
By Sunday night October 13, AFP disaster victim identification, forensic, investigation, intelligence and bomb-blast experts were on their way to Bali.
A dozen more disaster victim, bomb blast and forensic experts flew out of Canberra the following night, Monday October 14.
AFP forensic chemist David Royds was on this second flight, along with the contents of the AFP’s mobile laboratory. By Tuesday night, that lab had been set up in Kuta’s Kartika Plaza Hotel.
Finally, on the morning of Wednesday October 16, Royds and his colleagues made their first visit to the scene of the blasts.
From the first moment of their arrival, the Australian scientists were made aware of their subordinate status in the Indonesian investigation. While they were working in a “team”
effort, they were only to be allowed into the crime scenes after the Indonesian crime scene investigators had finished with them.
“Although everybody says we had this wonderful relationship with the Indonesian police, we really didn’t,” recalls Royds. “In fairness to them, it was their jurisdiction and from their perspective we were there to offer a second opinion, if asked. They had their investigation running but they were interested in what we, and our instruments, might come up with. They fed us ‘selected’ information.”
The forensic experts had three scenes to examine: Paddy’s Bar, where the first bomb went off; the Sari Club; and Renon, near the consulates.
On that first day, the Sari Club was the place where the Indonesian team was focusing its efforts.
Accordingly it was off limits to the Australians – as was Paddy’s Bar, in theory. But with their Operation Alliance partners’ attention elsewhere, the Australian scientists simply strolled into the scene of the first, smaller blast.
That morning Royds would make a discovery that was, in the end, absolutely crucial to the investigation. “I remember stepping over the barrier and walking into Paddy’s Bar,” Royds recalls.
“Everyone was looking at the floor, the detritus and all the damage there.” But Royds looked to the ceiling.
“There I saw a moment in time that had been captured in the form of spatter patterns in blood and soot,” he says. “They were just waiting to be interpreted.”
A photo taken in Paddy’s Bar on that first day shows the scientist standing on a table in the bar, in his heavy blue cotton forensic overalls. Huge sweat stains bloom on his back and under his arms as he reaches up to take scrapings of blood and soot from the bar’s concrete ceiling.
He was pretty sure that the soot he was sampling was TNT (trinitrotoluene). Unexploded, TNT has a yellow hue and looks like beeswax.
When it explodes it gives off grey soot. Tests later confirmed his suspicions. A patch of this soot on the ceiling would usually correlate to the seat of an explosion below. Spatters of blood and tissue also indicated a trajectory back to this point.
But there was no crater to be seen. How could this be? It seemed obvious that someone had been standing very close to the bomb, or possibly even carrying it, when it detonated. Might that person have been a suicide bomber?
Initially Royds was told to keep that theory to himself. At that point there was no acknowledgement that the bombing had even been a terrorist act.
The official Indonesian government position was that, while the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah was known, it was not yet active in Indonesia.
Investigators knew it was in Asia and that it favoured suicide bombers. The year before it had planned a bloody attack aimed at Westerners in Singapore.
Mercifully, it had been foiled.
Royds’ theory continued to niggle at him.
Where had the bomb been when it exploded? If it had been on the floor, it would have left a crater. It certainly hadn’t been on the heavy table on which Royds had stood to swab the ceiling. It would have reduced that substantial piece of furniture to matchsticks.
“That’s when I started thinking that the most plausible explanation was that it had been carried in by a human being,” he says.
On that very first day in Paddy’s Bar, Royds had done his swabbing of the roof first. He had then wandered around the room scanning the area for any other traces or remnants of an explosive device.
He wasn’t supposed to be collecting evidence. So he picked up a cup and pretended to be drinking water from it. When he spotted a couple of pieces of copper wire, they went straight into the cup: one for himself and one for his Indonesian colleagues if they wanted it.
The wire drew his attention because it was heat-damaged and distorted. It was also narrow and insulated. And it had a mono-core.
Electronic devices use multi-strand copper wires. But detonator leg wires are always mono-cored.
Later, back at the Kartika Plaza Hotel, the scientist put the wires into a fresh white envelope, which he tucked into his overalls pocket.
Six hours later, physically and mentally exhausted, he was about to collapse into bed. But, after a day of “sweating like you wouldn’t believe”, the stench of his overalls was a palpable second presence in his room. He just had to wash them. Dumping them in the hotel sink, he turned on the water, scrubbed them thoroughly and hung them out to dry overnight.
It was only the next morning that he remembered the envelope – and the potentially vital evidence he had just laundered. Heading straight for the hotel room that had been transformed into the AFP lab, he swabbed one 3-cm piece of wire. He was relieved to detect the presence of TNT.
He then put the wire under a low-powered microscope. What he saw astounded him. As the wire came into focus at a magnification of 40 times larger than life, he could see tiny cotton fibres in strands of red, blue and white attached to it.
This was a potentially momentous discovery. Yes, it was possible that it meant that the bomb had been wrapped in fabric to conceal it and this might also be a line of enquiry. Then he thought again of the spray of blood on the ceiling.
He was keeping his suicide bomber theory to himself, as requested. But perhaps these fibres had come from the suicide bomber’s clothing?
Just after Royds made his find in Paddy’s Bar, the Australians were asked to leave. The Indonesian investigators then began their examination and it was more than a week before the AFP scientists were allowed back in.
They spent that week examining the Renon bomb scene and also working on the difficult job of trying to find useful samples of bomb residue around the area of the Sari Club blast site.
But the question of the possible suicide bomber continued to weigh on Royds. He couldn’t wait to get back into Paddy’s Bar.
If a suicide bomber had been at work, and either wearing or carrying red, blue and white fabric, he might be able to find more traces of it.
Finally, eight days later, the Indonesian scientists completed their processing of the Paddy’s Bar scene and allowed the Australians back in.
Although the Indonesian police had cleaned the place out, there were still piles of brick and rubble, while some nooks and crannies remained unexplored.
The bar’s interior designer had created a “tropical” décor. Painted forty-four gallon drums were wrapped around posts to make faux tree trunks, with branches and leaves “growing” out of them. Might bomb fragments and residue have fallen down inside them?
They had. After the drums had been cut away, the Australians found several pieces of red, blue and white tartan fabric, clumps of creamy “wadding”, pieces of black fabric and bevelled-edged fragments of metal.
Traces of these materials were also detected under the rubble and in various other locations in this area.
Might the black fabric, wadding and the tartan fabric have come from a padded vest? And who would wear such a garment in the tropics? Even the Balinese, famously sensitive to cold, would probably go no further than long sleeves.
But what about a suicide bomber? Could this have been the remains of a vest bomb?
FBI scientists joined the team and set about tracing the different trajectories of blood spatter they had observed.
They used string to locate the spot where all the trajectories converged. They came together in an area about 1-1.5 m above the ground and directly beneath the grey soot deposits on the ceiling.
“This was the first piece of strong evidence that it was a suicide bomber,” Royds says. Meanwhile the Australians were busy mapping the locations of their finds of cloth and metal. They, too, centred on this point!
The results of DNA analysis of bloodstains on the roof above this point would be crucial.
“I wanted to see if more than one person was involved,” Royds recalls. Scientists would expect to find several DNA profiles, if, for example, people had been standing over something on the floor when it went off.
If, on the other hand, all the blood and biological material came from one person, a suicide bombing would be a more plausible explanation.
Within a couple of weeks it was confirmed that all the staining on the ceiling contained the same DNA. Furthermore, it was not a match to any of the known victims from Paddy’s Bar.
But Royds’ “suicide bomber” theory was still unofficial. Very unofficial. In fact, in a press conference given on November 1, three weeks after the bombing, the commander of the joint Indonesia-Australia police investigation, AFP Assistant Commissioner Graham Ashton (now Victoria’s Chief Commissioner of Police) made a point of hosing it down.
Yet Royds was sure he was right. He knew that the official denial of the “suicide bomber” theory was about political sensitivities, not science.
He kept his mouth shut and waited.
In the end he only had to wait until late November and the arrest of Imam Samudra, the Indonesian cleric who had masterminded the bombings.
Samudra told police that a young man had carried a bomb into Paddy’s Bar and detonated it himself. His name was Arnasan, but he was also known as “Iqbal 1”. (An Arabic boy’s name, Iqbal means “becoming successful”, “facing problems bravely and getting things done”.) But was he telling the truth?
Meanwhile, although the “suicide bomber” theory was being denied in public, it was still being quietly investigated in private, with forensic pathologists re-examining the body parts that had been brought into the Sanglah Hospital morgue in the aftermath of the bombing.
The focus of their investigation was “Body 006A”: a dismembered head and two lower legs that, DNA testing had revealed, belonged to the same person.
In the first weeks of the forensic investigation, the forensic pathologists who were documenting the bodies had been focusing on victims. They were not on the alert for a body with the kind of catastrophic injuries you would expect to find in a suicide bomber.
Now, with the benefit of a “suicide bomber” hypothesis to work with, Body 006A began to look very interesting. Royds assisted Dr Clive Cooke, a Western Australian government forensic pathologist, with the re-examination.
“It was likely that these two feet and head belonged to each other and there had been a catastrophic failure in the middle,” Royds says. “Cooke had also noted small skin flaps and a kind of black ‘tattooing’ on top of the feet, back of the calves, and under the chin. This ‘tattooing’ was caused by tiny particles of carbonaceous material actually penetrating the skin. All these characteristics were strong indicators of close contact with explosives at the time of detonation.
“There were signs that the bomb had damaged both the front and back of his body. And he had blast injuries into which some fragments of tartan fabric were recovered. So this had to be the suicide bomber.
“There were also bits of PVC embedded in his body parts – which we suspect were remnants of TNT-filled tubes that had lined his vest.”
The DNA of Body 006A was also a match to the DNA profile taken from the bloodstains on the ceiling of Paddy’s Bar.
But who was its owner?
This extract is taken from Crime Scene Asia, published by Big Sky. RRP $29.95.