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High explosive bomb prepared to attack State Palace: Police
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On alert: Police personnel search a rented house in Bintara Jaya subdistrict, Bekasi, West Java, on Saturday after the National Police’s Densus 88 counterterrorism squad found a high explosive bomb at the house. The bomb was allegedly prepared to attack the Presidential Palace in the neighboring capital. (Antara/Risky Andrianto)
T
he police say the bomb prepared in a plot to attack the State Palace in Central Jakarta contained high explosives, designed to create mass destruction and a large number of casualties.
Jakarta Police spokesman Sr. Comr. Raden Prabowo Argo Yuwono said the bomb, found on Saturday at a rented house in the neighboring region of Bekasi, West Java, weighed around 3 kilograms and was made of triacetone triperoxide (TATP), a highly explosive substance used in many terrorist attacks.
“If detonated, the bomb could have destroyed everything within a radius of 300 meters,” Argo said on Saturday evening.
(Read also: Densus 88 foils plot to bomb State Palace)
On Saturday, the National Police’s Densus 88 counterterrorism squad arrested two men and a woman in Bekasi, for allegedly plotting a bomb attack at the State Palace.
The first two suspects, identified only as NS and AS, were arrested at around 3:40 p.m. on Saturday on the Kalimalang overpass, while the other suspect, a 27-year-old woman identified only as DYN, was arrested 10 minutes later at a rented house in Bintara Jaya subdistrict, in which the police found the bomb packed into a pressure cooker.
The police’s initial investigation has found that the bomb was to have been detonated by DYN on Sunday morning during the Presidential Security Detail’s (Paspampres) handover ceremony at the palace
TATP, also known as the “Mother of Satan”, was the primary explosive material used in the bombs and suicide vests in the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. The unstable chemical was also used in the 2005 London bombings.
In January, a terrorist attack in Jl. MH Thamrin, Central Jakarta, left four of terrorists and four civilians dead, and more than 25 injured. (hwa)
