Prologue: The names I didn't know
Joe Frost
People have asked why I’ve done this.
What was I going to achieve, struggling with this... heavy thing?
Lifting something heavy can make you stronger. But it can also cause great damage if you aren't careful; if you’re not prepared for the load.
I don’t suppose I have a good answer as to why. I think just because it’s there. Bali will always be there.
So sometimes I pick it up.
But this time I lifted the weight because I wanted to grapple with it more deeply. I wanted to know what else happened in Bali. Not just what I saw.
I started asking some questions through official channels.
After not many answers, I wondered if maybe Google might know.
Google did know.
But I had to learn what to Google.
Most of these events happened at a time when newspapers were read on the kitchen table. That’s where you got the good stuff, in print. Some information could be found online, but often I was looking for details on scattily organised webpages that were old enough to legally drink.
The stuff I was searching for wasn’t exactly SEO-friendly.
Then, one night, as I browsed a photo gallery on a newswire’s website, I came upon a photo from inside Sanglah Hospital taken the day after the bombing. It was a whiteboard covered in text. I zoomed in.
It was a list of names. I had seen a list like this during my time at Sanglah.
On the whiteboard in the photo, there were eight names, and three people listed as unidentified.
Eventually, there would be 20 names on that list. 23 if you count the bombers. I don’t.
They were the departed.
I looked at the name I knew on the list, the other Aussie, who wasn’t from Newcastle: Fitzgerald.
Then I looked at the names I didn’t know.
They were Indonesian names, names I wasn’t familiar with. But they were legible and so searchable. So I began Googling Those Names + Bali 2005.
And after going around in circles for what had felt like forever, a whole world of new information suddenly opened up.
It was heartening and heartbreaking to read warm tributes to the other people who did not walk off the beach or out of the restaurant that night.
The vast majority of those murdered were Indonesians. Young people, waiters with families.
A little boy was killed. I've read he was 6, I’ve read he was 4. The details change but the truth remains.
From a purely selfish perspective, knowing the right names to Google found me more names to Google.
I was in bed one night, scrolling on my phone, when I first read the name Salik Firdaus.
I’d wondered about this man, in some small way, for almost 20 years.
I was corrected early on for calling him Sa-leek Fur-day-us. I assume I’m still not nailing it.
However it was pronounced, now he had a name.
But now he was also a link, because searching his name turned up the names of the other two men who came in on the bus from Java, knowing they would never leave Bali.
But also the names of his fellow recruits, who didn’t go to their deaths. Well, not that night.
And of the names of the leaders at different levels in the network.
The more I learnt? It just taught me there was more to learn.
This story ran so deep, its roots reaching back decades.
Critical action occurred in sleepy suburbs of cities I didn’t even know existed.
Then there were the names – dozens upon dozens of them, because going by an alias has enormous operational benefits, so it was common for these terrorists to change their name each mission. Some had four, five, six aliases.
And that meant a lot of double-ups. I would spend so much time pulling a thread only to eventually discover it was some other dude going by the fake name Iqbal in that particular town on that specific date.
One man who played a central role in the 2005 bombing I still can’t track down. He may have been killed or arrested, listed under a different alias. He may still be at large.
It was fascinating. Horrible.
It wasn’t a problem to be solved, a line of enquiry that ended in closure.
There is no closure. Bali’s not going anywhere.
But everyone‘s got heavy things.
A malevolent act steals a part of you.
Devastating violence alters your reality.
You lose someone you love in the most unfair circumstances.
We all feel the weight from time to time.
I am looking forward to putting it down though. I've carried it long enough – for now.
Act 1: The Hotel
Joe Frost
On August 5 2003, a car loaded with explosives stopped in front of the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta. In the wake of the deadly blast, the severed head of the man who had been behind the wheel was found on the fifth floor of the hotel.
News reports from the time said a statement released after the attack specifically said the bombing had been a message to America and Australia.
However, 11 of the 12 people killed were Indonesians, as were most of the 150 or so who suffered injuries.
Investigators made note that the bomb used bore striking similarities to the devices used in both the multiple church bombings on Christmas Eve of 2000 and the Bali Bombing of 2002.
As for who was responsible, al Qaeda and JI were regarded as prime suspects.
But while both these networks had some bearing on the 2003 Jakarta Marriott attack, neither of them were directly responsible.
By building bombs for the Christmas Eve attacks in the year 2000, Azhari had pinned his colours to the mast. He left his family in 2001, reportedly saying to his wife: "I have a greater cause in life. It is to serve God."
Azhari’s next act in this so-called ‘service to God’ was to build the bombs that would devastate Kuta and kill more than 200 people in the 2002 Bali Bombings.
As for his former student, Noordin Top? Noordin was back at school.
Far from simply being reactionaries, bombing civilians without any thought as to what would come next, Jemaah Islamiyah’s founders, Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Bashir, had long-term ambitions.
In the 1980s, the two had sent a teenage Nasir Abbas to Aghanistan, where he spent three years as a student, then three as an instructor at a military academy. When he returned, Nasir helped establish training camps for the nascent JI to send recruits:
Nasir Abbas
Actually, the original mission of JI is to establish an Islamic state in Indonesia.
To establish an Islamic state, it’s not only use the military force, but also in JI, there’s an education division, there’s a social division, there’s an economic division. So these, the social, economic and also education division, they work hard... to call people, to give the message to people, to make people understand – the Muslims understand – that it is why Muslim need to have an Islamic state.
Joe Frost
The seeds of this decades-long plan to create an Indonesian government that strictly stuck to Sharia Law were planted in the 1970s, as both Sungkar and Bashir chafed at the dictatorial regime of then-President Suharto. This was some 20 years before JI was even founded, when Sungkar and Bashir started a pesantren – that is, an Islamic boarding school – in Central Java.
Officially called Al-Mukmin, the school is better known as Ngruki, which is the village where it is located. Ngruki’s intentions for its students reflected the militancy of its founders. In 2004, CNN reported a slogan displayed in one classroom that read: "Death in the way of Allah is our highest aspiration."
Quinton Temby
If you go down Ngruki – which I have – you'll find it's not just that school, it's sort of the whole surroundings. It's a kind of a microcosm of people who were sort of quite militant in their views.
So that's quite typical that JI created a whole radical community around itself wherever it's set up.
My name's Quinton Temby, I'm an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Monash University at Monash's new foreign campus in Indonesia, and I've spent my career researching politics in Southeast Asia.
Joe Frost
After establishing the Ngruki pesantren in the 1970s, a vast network of schools with similar aims for its students grew – and not just in Indonesia.
By the mid-1980s, Sungkar and Bashir had caught the ire of the Suharto government and had fled Indonesia, ending up in neighbouring Malaysia.
In 1993, while in Malaysia, Sungkar and Bashir established yet another school, called Luqmanal-Hakim, near the city of Johor Bahru.
They replicated the curriculum from their Ngruki pesantren, and a school community grew into a village – isolated among the palm trees.
Initially, students were the children of JI members, but some in the local community began sending their kids too.
Nasir Abbas worked at Luqmanal-Hakim. I asked him if it went from being a school to something of a community hub.
Nasir Abbas
Yes, yes, yes! Because since 1993, the school is become as a base, a base camp, a base for JI. All their activities are there... They call all the JI members in Johor Bahru to go there. And also they call others who was not in JI and want to join the Islamic studies, they call to the school, in the same time they promote the school.
Joe Frost
In what would prove to be a critical turn of events, the Luqmanal-Hakim pesantren was just a short distance from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, which was the very institution both Azhari and Noordin Top attended as teacher and student.
I asked Quinton Temby whether, if Azhari and Noordin had simply been at a different university, none of this would have happened.
Quinton Temby
JI was always going to recruit people from around them wherever they'd set up in Malaysia. One of the developments we saw when JI moved to Malaysia that was of great benefit to JI is they found themselves with access to a completely different pool of recruits than they had in Central Java.
So if you can sort of picture – if you can at all – Central Java, maybe people have been on holiday there. I'm not sure. Maybe not. Not very many Australians go from Bali to Central Java, but it's a very rural place... Just by contrast, when JI was in Malaysia, they found themselves now with a pool of recruits they could they could seek to leverage who were just more highly trained, more technical... many more university graduates in the hard sciences that they could draw on.
Joe Frost
Whatever led them there, by the mid-90s both Azhari and Noordin were members of the Lukman Al Hakim community. After swearing their allegiance to JI, both of them received training in the Philippines.
After this initial training, Azhari was sent to Afghanistan to learn bombmaking. But Noordin was sent back to Lukmanal-Hakim, as second in charge.
There, Noordin began to make his own long-term plans, by tapping into the pesantren community to develop a network of people who could offer him shelter during his years on the run.
More importantly, he also began recruiting students for upcoming missions.
Quinton Temby
Yeah. So he was able to develop a following and, based partly on his leadership in Malaysia, based partly on his sort of skills, but also I think on intangible things like his charisma.
Noordin Top was this perfect complement at the time to the skills of Azahari, in that he wasn't a skilled bomb maker. But what he was – or what he turned out to have – was the skills of being able to cultivate a loyal following and to be able to indoctrinate younger followers into serving as suicide bombers for him, and so that's where he started to leverage small study circles, started to use the Internet to attract recruits and to disseminate propaganda...
It wasn't always clear that suicide bombing would become a normalised thing in Indonesia, but it did thanks to Noordin Top unfortunately.
Joe Frost
Lukmanal-Hakim closed its doors in early 2002, a result of a Malaysian crackdown on JI. So Noordin made the move to West Sumatra, in Indonesia, where he earned a living fixing car shock absorbers.
Following the 12 October 2002 attack on Bali, more than a crackdown, Indonesia’s police were determined to smash the network responsible for the most devastating terrorist attack in their nation’s history.
Nasir Abbas remembers this time well. It was when he was arrested.
Nasir Abbas
So whenever they start to do the Bali bomb on big bomb, I say, ‘this is not only disaster for Bali, this is also disaster for JI.’ And what I think is right. Police is discovering that the people who did the Bali bomb has background of JI. And police arresting all the leaders of JI.
And police found me.
I try to fight against police, I try to set the gun and we fight, I fight against the police – two policemen injured because of me – but they arrest me alive. Because they need me alive. They want to know why I disagree, why I different from the others.
Joe Frost
Nasir was hardly alone in ending up behind bars. There were hundreds of arrests. Noordin needed to keep his head down – trying to contact any of his previous JI superiors would have been a fast-track to prison or the grave.
However, this served to exacerbate Noordin’s belief that his bombing campaign was justified. Noordin believed he was in a genuine state of war. And when you’re in the heat of battle, you don’t ask your superiors for permission to kill your enemies.
You simply take action.
Shortly after the 2002 Bali bombing, Noordin received two visits that would shape his future.
The first, was Azhari. A wanted man after his role building bombs in both the Christmas Eve and first Bali Bombings, it’s fair to assume Azhari came to his former student looking for more than just a place to hide – he wanted an accomplice for further missions.
The second of Noordin’s visitors was another JI member who wanted to rid himself of highly incriminating evidence. Specifically, a store of unused explosives from the Christmas Eve bombings.
Noordin and Azhari were determined to put these leftovers to deadly use.
Over the ensuing nine or so months, Noordin tapped into the school network he had developed while he was a leader of the Malaysian pesantren, pulling together a team comprised of former students and teachers of either Lukmanal-Hakim or Ngruki.
And on 5 August 2003, Azhari had assembled a 150-kilogram bomb, while Noordin ensured a graduate of a JI pesantren would drive the van carrying that bomb to the Marriott, the young man knowing the last thing he would ever see was a hotel lobby through a car windscreen.
Act 2: The Embassy
Joe Frost
A little over a year after the attack on the Jakarta Marriott, on 9 September 2004, a white delivery van parked in front of the Australian Embassy in that same city. At 10.25am, the suicide bomber behind the wheel of the van detonated the one-tonne explosive device packed into the vehicle.
The streets of the Indonesian capital were rocked by the enormous blast, hundreds of windows shattering, as buildings sustained shocking damage.
Nanda Daniel
The bus stopped across the Embassy. And it’s like, like this - this is the Embassy, this is my bus.
It’s about 200 meters from the Australian Embassy from the bomb point to my bus.
Joe Frost
Nanda Daniel, a young woman in her 20s on that day in 2004, spent a year in hospital as a result of her injuries. It could have been far worse.
Nanda Daniel
When the bomb blast happen, there was a little girl behind my back. And at the time I felt that she protects me from the bomb effect, you know? So all the materials is hit her instead of me. But a month later she die.
And it’s been playing in my mind. I feel very guilty because before I was thankful by having her behind my back and after I know that she died, it really breaks my heart.
Joe Frost
The human toll was devastating, with nine innocent people losing their lives. Tellingly, despite the bomb targeting the Australian embassy, all nine people killed were Indonesian.
Within weeks, Indonesian police named their two main suspects for planning the bombing: sworn JI members Noordin Top and Azhari Husin.
But while Noordin and Azhari were still technically members of JI, Quinton Temby says it’s not the case that the attacks on the Marriott in 2003 and Australian Embassy in 2004 were JI attacks.
Quinton Temby
None of these attacks that we saw were official JI operations. It's slightly more nuanced than that. These were collaborations with Al Qaeda that most rank-and-file JI people wouldn't have known about, wouldn't have had access to information about.
Abu Bakar Bashir himself – I think it's clear from the record – gave a green light to these terrorist attacks. But he wasn't operationally involved in them...
It's sort of a bit like the classic Mafia Don of movie fame. He was too smart to get involved in anything operationally that would have made him vulnerable to prosecution. That's why prosecutors in Indonesia have always had a tough time putting him away.
Joe Frost
More than just the nuance of ‘who in JI knew what’ making Noordin and Azhari’s actions independent of JI, there was also the fact they had undergone something of a rebrand.
Rather than continuing to attribute their actions to JI, Noordin and Azhari decided to give their network a new name – albeit one that had direct links to arguably the most famous name in terrorism.
Noordin and Azhari’s network would be known as al Qaeda in the Malay Archipelago.
Quinton Temby
Yes, Noordin Top sought to create a brand for himself, this so-called al Qaeda in the Malaya Archipelago, which I think was perhaps the logical conclusion of how JI had unintentionally evolved over the years because of that escape to Malaysia and the broadening of their recruitment circles.
And that's where you could have things like part of JI under Hambali working with al Qaeda and becoming so crucial to al Qaeda's operations because they had this transnational, logistical capability in Southeast Asia.
Noordin Top sought to kind of logically extend that by creating an organisation branded as, if you like, a Malay transnational organisation and sought to get support for that organisation from Al Qaeda and ...
I see that as very much taking us into the era where Internet media is becoming more important and branding is becoming more important. Noordin Top pioneered using the Internet, using websites in Indonesia to propagandise and recruit. And, what he wanted, of course, more than anything was support and following from overseas and from and sort of blessing from Al Qaeda. And I think he always struggled to get the notoriety and the support from overseas, from Al Qaeda that he sought. But that was certainly his intention.
Joe Frost
Noordin had also alienated himself from JI by looking further afield when it came to recruitment.
While he would continue to rely on his connections in the JI pesantren network, for the attack on the Australian Embassy, Noordin used recruits from a group known as Darul Islam.
At this point, I’m aware of the difficulty of keeping track of all the names, aliases and networks, so we won’t go into the nitty-gritty of Darul Islam. Suffice to say, while the group could be described as an ally of JI, for Noordin to go out and recruit from Darul Islam was not looked upon favourably by his JI superiors.
It was yet another clear indication that Noordin and Azhari were now running their own show.
In the early months of 2005, Noordin and Azhari – sometimes together, sometimes apart – began to draw up plans for their next attack.
Having struck Bali in 2002, the Jakarta Marriott in 2003 and the Australian Embassy in 2004, Azhari and Noordin were determined to stick to the annual schedule.
After assessing a number of targets, it was decided they would once again strike Bali, using suicide bombers who would be collectively known as Bridegrooms. Reportedly, suicide bombers had this codename because, upon the completion of their mission, these young men would find brides in the afterlife.
While the promise of a new wife in heaven may be some form of reward, it’s difficult to conceive that this was the sole means by which the Bridegroom were convinced that their death in the pursuit of further death was worthwhile. However, Quinton Temby says, counter-intuitively, strong bonds of love exist in these murderous factions.
Quinton Temby
One of the ways that terrorist groups work is their strong internal cohesion and strong bonds of trust, and that explains a lot of the sort of indoctrination and so on. And so one, sort of gloss on that, that scholars have used, because it's kind of counterintuitive, is to say there's hatred of the out group but there's a lot of in-group love among militants.
And it's often bound together by family relationships and so on, and so it's one of these paradoxes to help one understand how these small, tight-knit, tightly-knit groups can sometimes be very effective and very hard to detect because they're so committed to each other.
Joe Frost
The experience of former JI member Nasir Abbas is different but may be instructive.
Nasir was just 16 years old when he first met JI founders Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Bashir – who, by then, were well-regarded scholars aged in their late 40s. Within two years, Sungkar and Bashir had convinced Nasir to go to war in Afghanistan and then dedicate his young life to their militant cause.
I asked Nasir if, rather than a message of hatred, Sungkar and Bashir had won him over by offering him a sense of belonging and acceptance?
Nasir Abbas
Yes! That is what happened. Yes.
Any time I said, ‘Ustaz, can I come to your house, I want to ask something’, they say yes. Anytime. They never say no to me.
1985 I was 16 years old. So I was impressed with these two persons because. I was learning, study about Islam, and then I also go to their house to know more about Islam by reading books. So I not realise that it was the starting of recruiting, they start to recruit me but I not realise that.
Joe Frost
It feeds the theory that while Azhari’s bomb-making was obviously critical in the network’s attacks, the real skill was in recruitment.
Because for a suicide bombing to work, you need to convince someone to suicide.
But where the car bombings at the Jakarta Marriott and Australian Embassy had each only called for one bomber, this time Noordin and Azhari decided they needed multiple Bridegrooms.
An alumni of the pesantren network named Jabir, who had joined Al Qaeda in the Malay Archipelago for the Embassy Bombing, was tasked with recruiting Bridegrooms for Bali 2. He chose a fellow former pesantren student and teacher, named Salik Firdaus.
Salik then brought two more young men into the fold, Misno and Aip Hidayat.
Salik and Misno wore their deadly backpacks onto the sands of Jimbaran Beach.
Hidayat, however, was sent to his death in a busy indoor restaurant in the heart of Kuta.
Act 3: The other restaurant
Terry Fitzgerald
They were typical kids but they’re both good kids...
Brendan was a very talented cricketer and a good footballer and Jessie was even playing a little bit of cricket there for a while as well.
Joe Frost
On the first of October 2005, Terry Fitzgerald was enjoying a relaxing holiday in Bali with his 16-year-old son, Brendan, and his 13-year-old daughter, Jessica.
After a day of shopping and surfing, it was time for the evening meal, so Terry and his kids made their way in to Kuta.
Terry Fitzgerald
We got to Raja's restaurant, had a look at the menu, and there was something on there for all of us. So we went inside and ordered a soft drink.
Joe Frost
There were three bombs in the 2005 Bali Bombing. In previous episodes, we’ve gone through what happened on Jimbaran Beach, where Salik Firdaus and Misno detonated their bombs.
The third bomber, Aip Hidayat, hit Raja’s restaurant.
Terry Fitzgerald
It had tables and chairs alfresco, and also had a lot of tables and chairs on the inside. And we, our table was sort of at the point where the building stopped and the Alfresco started.
Yeah. And then, then, as I say, the bomb went off and, and that's what happened.
Joe Frost
If you’ve ever seen footage of the 2005 Bali bombing, odds are it’s footage of Raja’s.
Someone is walking through the restaurant, filming on what is probably a basic digital camera.
It’s a busy evening in the well-lit venue. People are eating, chatting, the staff are going about their work.
A figure in dark clothes and carrying a backpack walks briefly across the shot, but draws no attention to himself.
Then, a few seconds later, you see a flash of ignition, hear an almighty bang and people screaming, the lights cut, and the footage is swamped with smoke and debris.
Terry Fitzgerald
I remember it being black, and I could feel this sort of gritty ash stuff every time I took a breath in my mouth, which was residue from the bomb. Initially, I thought I was stuck under something because I couldn't move. And, you know, I didn't realize at the time that one of the 30 something pieces of shrapnel had lodged in my spinal cord...
Then I recall being carried out. And I kept asking or I kept telling people that, look, I've got two kids here. I need to find my kids... And so that was a very worrying time for me.
Joe Frost
Coming in and out of consciousness, Terry was taken into the street.
Terry Fitzgerald
And fortunately for me, there were a couple of Victorian nurses that were just up the street when it happened, and they managed to get myself taken to the hospital.
I remember being in the back of the taxi, and I asked the nurses if someone was sitting on my chest, because I had this extremely heavy feeling on my chest that what had happened was that my spleen had been ruptured by the blast, and what I was feeling was the effects of the ruptured spleen.
Joe Frost
Terry was taken to BIMC, before being transferred to Sanglah Hospital, in the heart of Kuta, where his treatment began.
Terry Fitzgerald
We've got the ruptured spleen I've mentioned, the 30-something shrapnel wounds – I've still got 20 something left in me – lacerated liver – and then there were the burns.
I remember, remember thinking, ‘This is it. This is how it this is how it ends.’
Joe Frost
When Terry came to, it was Tuesday, 4 October and he was in a completely different country.
Terry Fitzgerald
When I woke up in Singapore, the people at the hospital hadn't cleaned me up. They hadn't dressed any of my wounds. I was just lying on the trolley. And then my parents arrived, and my two sisters arrived, and they spoke to the medical people there, and they started the clean-up job.
I still couldn't move at that point. I could move my arms and my head, and that was, that was about it. So I can only say to you that the clean-up was extremely painful. But looking back, they did a good job, because everything seems to have healed quite nicely, other than not having the use of both legs.
Joe Frost
Along with his ruptured spleen, which had been removed in Bali, and lacerated liver, Terry also had two perforated eardrums, a shattered knuckle, and his left ulna nerve had been severed.
Finally, a piece of shrapnel had lodged itself in, and partially severed, Terry’s spinal cord.
Terry Fitzgerald
Well, the facts were that I was probably never going to walk again, and I'd have to get used to life in a wheelchair, as opposed to being someone who could walk. That was ... that, was that the extent of it.
Joe Frost
Terry’s daughter, Jessica, was also in Singapore General Hospital, just a few rooms down from him. Jessica was being treated for burns and shrapnel wounds, and recovery would be lengthy, but her long-term prognosis was positive.
As for Brendan?
Terry Fitzgerald
Well, I already knew, Joe. I just had this feeling. I mean, I, I just knew. I mean, I can't describe it any better than that, I don't think, I – I just knew.
Joe Frost
Terry lay in a hospital bed, an ocean away from home, his body peppered with shrapnel that would stay inside him.
He had been told he was never going to walk again. His daughter had been flown to Singapore for treatment of her injuries. And Terry’s son was dead.
Terry Fitzgerald
The emotions that were going through my head and – and, look, I couldn't do anything other than lie there. And think about it all at the time, when I couldn't get up and go anywhere, I couldn't do anything. I was just lying there. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. So all I had to do was think about it, and it was probably one of the worst things that I can imagine happening to any parent.
Joe Frost
In the moments after the blast at Raja’s, as he lay on the ground in the rubble and chaos – unable to move yet unaware of why – Terry's world was quiet. Raja's was surely filled with the sounds of screaming people and approaching sirens, yet for a man with two destroyed eardrums, there was no sound.
And among the silent destruction, Terry had a moment with his son.
Terry Fitzgerald
I had this image of Brendan come into my head. He was wearing an orange stripe t-shirt for some reason. I don't know why – he doesn't have an orange and white stripe t shirt – but I could only see him from the waist up. And he told me that he wouldn't be getting picked for any more games. And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘I just won't be playing any more games Dad.’
Mean, I know it sounds – it might sound far-fetched to some people, but that's what happened.
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