Indonesia police identify mosque bomber
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Indonesian police on Monday identified a suicide bomber who blew himself up and wounded 30 people at a Muslim on Friday prayer as a man on a police wanted list over previous attacks.
Forensic tests showed the bomber was Mohammed Syarif, 32, and police have seized nails and explosive materials including potassium nitrate, aluminium and sulphur from his parents' home, detectives told a televised press conference.
Deputy chief detective Matheus Salempang said Syarif's motives and any links with terror groups are still under investigation, but it had been "concluded and irrefutably proven" that he was the bomber.
"What we do know is that Syarif had been on the police wanted list in similar cases, including an attack on a minimarket in Cirebon," he said.
Syarif detonated explosives strapped to his body at a mosque within a police station in Cirebon, West Java province, on Friday as worshippers began their prayers.
The explosion killed him instantly and injured 30 people, six of them seriously. The wounded — who were mostly policemen including the Cirebon police chief — were found with nails, nuts and bolts lodged in their bodies.
Police said Syarif was a Cirebon resident and had damaged the minimarket's property in the previous attack because it sold alcohol. Similar attacks have been carried out on stores and bars by Islamic hardliners in Indonesia.
National police spokesman Anton Bachrul Alam said Syarif's fingerprints, dental records and DNA samples from his parents "matched 100 per cent" with the dead man.
The attack was the first suicide bombing inside a mosque in the world's largest Muslim-majority nation of 240 million people.
Indonesia is struggling to deal with the threat of homegrown Islamist militants who oppose the country's secular, democratic system and want to create a caliphate across much of Southeast Asia.
A series of bombings in recent years in the country have been were blamed on regional terror network Jemaah Islamiyah, including the 2002 Bali bombings which killed 202 people.
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