JAKARTA, Indonesia – Two Indonesian suicide bombers lounged and casually snacked in a grass field near luxury Jakarta hotels weeks before they attacked them, videos released by police Tuesday showed.
The footage was pulled from a laptop found in a backpack on regional al-Qaida commander Noordin Top, a Malaysian who was shot dead two weeks ago during a police raid in Central Java.
The video, taken in the last week of June, also shows the men jogging on a road that passes the hotels and trying on clothing to wear on the day of their deaths.
Three weeks later, the men walked into the lounges of the Ritz-Carlton and J.W. Marriott and blew themselves up. The July 17 explosions killed seven people and wounded more than 50, ending a four-year pause in terrorist attacks in the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation.
"This is our target," one of the bombers, Dani Permana, an 18-year-old high school graduate, says on the video, pointing to the hotels. "This is a very noble way to destroy the enemies of Islam. This is not suicide." He detonated explosives inside the J.W. Marriott, where four Westerners were killed.
Police said Tuesday the man who shot the video is believed to be Syaifuddin Zuhri, who allegedly recruited the bombers and remains at large.
A letter recovered from Noordin's laptop, believed to have been written to Zuhri's family, says he joined an al-Qaida affiliated group called Salafi Jihadi during studies in Yemen. He has held a prominent position in Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad — a group that was headed by Noordin — since 2005, said the typed note shown to the media.
The second bomber was Nana Maulana, 28. He is seen in the video footage wearing a baseball cap and eating a shrimp cracker as the men sit cross-legged in a grass field in downtown Jakarta. The two hotels are in the background.
"America has to be destroyed. Australia has to be destroyed. Indonesia has to be destroyed," says a voice, believed to be that of Zuhri.
Police continue to hunt for several fugitive suspects in the hotel bombings, the first terror attack in Indonesia since triple suicide blasts on the resort island of Bali in 2005.
Regional terror network Jemaah Islamiyah and the splinter faction headed by Noordin have been linked to a series of bombings that killed more than 250 people in Indonesia. Most of the victims were foreigners who died in devastating 2002 blasts at Bali nightclubs.
Noordin's group had hundreds of pounds (kilograms) of chemicals needed to make explosives and was plotting new attacks, police investigator Tito Karnavian told reporters. He declined to give details, saying inquiries were ongoing.
Noordin's family is due to collect his remains from a police morgue in Jakarta this week and return them to his Malaysian hometown for burial.