Indonesian police said Friday the alleged coordinator of the 2002 Bali attacks has explained how he assembled the bombs and handed the switch to an accomplice. Umar Patek has been cooperating with police interrogators since his extradition Thursday from Pakistan, where he was arrested in January in the town where Osama bin Laden was subsequently killed by US commandos.
“He has confessed to helping to assemble the bombs for the Bali bombing, and worked with Azahari. The switch was handed to Azahari,” police spokesman Anton Bachrul Alam said. Azahari was a Malaysian extremist who police killed in a shootout in 2005 as they hunted members of the Jemaah Islamiyah terror network responsible for the Bali bombings, which killed 202 people mainly Western tourists.
Alam said Patek had also confessed to carrying out a series of church bombings in Indonesia on Christmas Eve 2000, which killed 19 people.
