An Italian is among the suspects who have been arrested in connection with the main Bali bombing. Newspapers identified him as Andrea Giovanni Sorteni (38) from Milan, and said he was detained soon after the devastating attack on the Sari Club.
He has reportedly been held in a police cell in the Indonesian town of Denpasar for the past three weeks on charges of violating immigration laws.
Pino Buongiorno, a journalist investigating the matter, said Sorteni had been living in Bali for 18 months, running discotheques and night clubs. He fell under suspicion because of his friendship with a young Saudi man, known as Abdullah, whom the Indonesian secret services suspect of organising the bombing on the orders of al-Qaeda.
Sorteni bought a disco called Scandal, less than a mile from the Sari Club, Buongiorno said. He organised a two-day party that started the night before the October 12 bombing and was billed as ”the ultimate explosion party”.
Buongiorno said that after the Sari Club blast, Mr Sorteni and Abdullah were seen together just a few metres from the site of the massacre.
”Giovanni can’t have any connection to the Islamists,” his brother-in-law, Marco Bonavoglia, told the Rome daily La Repubblica yesterday. ”He has nothing whatever to do with the Islamic religion.” – Guardian Unlimited (2001) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001