JAKARTA, Indonesia - Indonesian police questioned two alleged Islamist militants Tuesday about possible al Qaeda links to twin suicide bombings in the capital last month that killed seven people, officials said.
The men, who were detained on Saturday by special forces, may have worked as couriers to channel funding from abroad for the July 17 attacks on the J.W. Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels, said a counterterrorism investigator. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
The blasts, which killed six foreigners and wounded 50 other people, ended a four-year break in terrorism in the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation and revived the hunt for the country's most wanted militant fugitive, Noordin Muhammad Top.
Police chief Nurullah in Kuningan, West Java, said Indonesian citizen Iwan Herdiansyah and Ali Mohammad Abdillah, a Saudi Arabian, were undergoing interrogation after being picked up at separate locations in the province. He could not provide details.
The anonymous investigator said authorities were following leads that the July blasts, believed to have been planned by a violent offshoot of the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorism network led by Noordin, were paid with money wired through Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Malaysia.
Police are interrogating the men to determine "if the money used to fund the bombings came from al Qaeda, which provided funding for previous attacks in Indonesia," the anonymous investigator told The Associated Press.
Iwan, the Saudi national, had been running an Internet cafe and two shops selling Islamic books and toys since returning to Indonesia a year ago after five years at home, the official said.
The police can hold suspects for a week without charge under the country's anti-terrorism laws.
It has been unclear who financed the July strikes in Jakarta, but al Qaeda has bankrolled attacks that killed more than 240 people, mostly foreign tourists on Bali, since 2002.
Noordin, the self-proclaimed commander of al Qaeda in Indonesia, has been blamed for every major attack since 2003, including the first J.W. Marriott bombing in 2003 and an attack on the Australian Embassy in 2004.
National Police spokesman Nanan Sukarna declined to comment Tuesday on the possible al Qaeda link, saying only that police continued to look into the flow of funds used for terrorism in Indonesia.
There have been 68 suspect financial transactions between 2004 to 2009 that were allegedly related to terrorist activities, the government's transaction watchdog has reported.
