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By Root 1043 0

consideration. Imam Samudra recruited five young Indonesian men as suicide bombers. For three weeks he and this separate cell kept two bars on Bali’s Kuta Beach under surveillance. As Samudra recalled: ‘We sat in the car in front of the Sari Club. I saw lots of whiteys dancing, and lots of whiteys drinking there, that place—Kuta and especially Paddy’s Bar and the Sari Club—was a meeting place for US terrorists and their allies, who the whole world knows to be monsters.’ When it was subsequently pointed out that most of their victims were Australians rather than Americans, Amrozi quipped: ‘Australians, Americans, whatever—they’re all white people.’

They rented a white L-300 Mitsubishi van. After removing the seats they loaded it with twelve small filing cabinets, each filled with a mix of potassium chlorate, sulphur and aluminium powder. They wired this up to ninety-four detonators made from three grams of RDX plastic explosive and a booster of TNT. Not trusting in fate, there were four separate detonation systems: a mobile phone, a trigger operated by Arnasan, one of the suicide drivers, a timer in case he could not pull this switch, and a booby-trap trigger inside one of the filing cabinets which would go off if opened. At the last minute they discovered that Arnasan could not change gears or turn a car. Ali Imron, a brother of Mukhlas, had to take his place, with Arnasan and ‘Jimi’, a suicide bomber, alongside. Imron parked the van and left.98

At five past eleven at night on 12 October 2002, Jimi walked into a crowded Paddy’s Pub on Legian Street. It was a popular haunt of young Australian and American tourists, some breaking their long journeys with an exotic holiday involving cheap booze and easy sex.99 As Jimi exploded, many patrons rushed outside, where they were incinerated in a double-tap attack by a one-ton device detonated by Arnasan in the white Mitsubishi van. The effects on the ‘white meat’ were catastrophic, although many Balinese trinket and food sellers died too as the blast set their straw-roofed shacks alight. Two hundred and two people perished, eighty-eight of them Australians, a huge loss for a relatively underpopulated country. Many victims received horrific burn injuries and had to be immersed in hotel pools. Others were flown to hospitals in Darwin and Perth. A third smaller device in a package Imron had earlier carefully dropped from a motorbike was detonated outside the US consulate in Denpasar by a mobile phone call, the detonation system representing a new level of sophistication.

Swift police work meant the arrest of the operation’s immediate commander, Amrozi, who announced, ‘Gosh, you guys are very clever, how did you find me?’ His home had the usual bombers’ paraphernalia of receipts for chemicals, training manuals and copies of speeches by Abu Bakar Ba’asyir and bin Laden. A mobile phone had the stored numbers of several of his associates, who were arrested too. Ali Imron was also arrested. At a bizarre news conference, he boasted: ‘The capability of our group as one of the Indonesian nation [sic] should make people proud.’ Attempts to connect Abu Bakar Ba’asyir with the bombing failed, although he was subsequently given a two-year sentence for inciting it and other terrorist outrages. He saw himself as like the salesman of sharp knives who is not responsible for how his customers use them, a peculiar view of the role of religious preacher.100

Hambali used US$15,000 to support the families of the imprisoned terrorists. Although he did not need this pretext, from then on Australia’s prime minister John Howard, the most successful conservative leader in the world, would be a loyal ally in the ‘war on terror’, bringing his fellow countrymen’s characteristic lack of circumlocution and tough-mindedness to the issues.101 Azahari was killed during a siege by Indonesia’s elite Detachment 88 counter-terrorism unit. He threw bombs from a house, urging the police to enter so as to join him in paradise. Colonel Petrus Reingard Golose of Detachment 88 remarked: ‘he said he didn’t want to die alone,