Three men detained as part of Indonesian police raids last week in which a top Asian militant was killed have been named suspects over October's bombings on Bali island, an officer said yesterday.

They are the first suspects named in the wake of the suicide bombings at three restaurants on the Indonesian resort island on October 1, which killed 20 people.

Officers were questioning the three on Bali after bringing them to the resort island from Semarang on neighboring Java island with their feet and hands chained and heads covered by a sheet.

Bali police spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Antonius Reniban said they had seized notebooks indicating the man had been planning more attacks, and planned to charge them under the anti-terror law for "assisting the perpetrators of a bombing."

Police said the men were recruits of Malaysian Azahari bin Husin, a master bombmaker, who was killed last Wednesday in a shootout with police in East Java province. Police have already linked Azahari to the latest Bali attacks.

The three men were picked up in the central Java city of Semarang last week.

Asked by reporters if they were the first suspects in police custody, Bali police spokesman Antonius Reniban said: "At this moment, those we have in Bali are these three."

Reniban said they were being investigated under the anti-terrorism law on suspicion of providing assistance to the bombers who blew up their explosives-laden backpacks on October 1.

"These three people were arrested in Semarang. They have been brought here so we can intensify the investigation in relation to the cases at Kuta and Jimbaran," Reniban said, referring to the locations of last month's attacks.

Azahari was a senior figure in Jemaah Islamiah, a militant group seen as the regional arm of al-Qaida.

Authorities say he also designed and supervised the making of the car bomb that caused the most damage in the 2002 attacks on Bali that killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists.

US Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales, visiting Indonesia as part of a regional tour, praised the killing by an elite police unit partly funded by Washington as a "major step forward in the war on terror."

The anti-terror law was rushed through Parliament after bombings on Bali in 2002 which killed 202 people, most of them foreign tourists. Prosecutors have since used it to convict scores of militants, including three sentenced to death over the 2002 attacks.

(China Daily November 17, 2005)