INDONESIA: 3,000 DETONATORS AND FUSES SEIZED ON PASSENGER FERRY

Nunukan, East Kalimantan, 17 Feb. (AKI) - Police arrested two people and seized some 3,000 detonators and fuses on a passenger ferry on the island of Borneo. The devices were sequestrated as they were being transferred onto the ferry from a boat that had arrived from Malaysia. The arrests were made last week but were only made public on Friday, said Maj. Gen. Sitompul.

The two men will be charged under laws regulating explosive materials that carry a possible death penalty, Sitompul said. He declined to speculate on whether the detonators were intended for terrorist use.

Borneo is a key transit point between militant training camps in the insurgency-wracked southern Philippines and their centres of operation in Indonesia. However, illegal miners and fishermen also use home-made bombs to break up rocks or stun fish, and regularly buy these on the black market in Indonesia.

Almost 250 people have been killed in a series of bombings in Indonesia in recent years, blamed on al-Qaida linked militants. The most recent was the attack on 1 October last year on restaurants popular with foreign tourists on the island of Bali that killed 20 people.

The Indonesian authorities are particularly wary of material that might be used in similar attacks in the future.