Cops' U-turn on terrorist: Top not dead

JAKARTA: A suspect shot dead in Indonesia last weekend was not Islamic militant Noordin Mohammad Top and he is still at large, police said yesterday, dashing hopes for a breakthrough in a hunt for the mastermind of a string of attacks.

The man killed in the raid was identified as Ibrohim, who worked as a florist in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Jakarta and is suspected to be the inside man on the suicide bombings at two luxury hotels in Jakarta last month.

"We checked samples with (Ibrohim's) family in Cilimus and it's a 100 percent match," said Eddy Saparwoko, head of Indonesia's Disaster Victim Identification unit. Cilimus is a district in Cirebon in West Java.