Soap bars used 'to make Marriott bomb deadlier

A Malaysian explosives expert who built the Marriott hotel bomb in the Indonesian capital used dozens of bars of laundry soap to increase its deadliness, a report said on Wednesday.

'The effect would be like a napalm bomb,' Tempo news magazine quoted an unidentified police officer as saying in its latest edition. The respected magazine, quoting the confessions of two detained Marriott suspects, gave new details of how the Malaysian, Azahari Husin, built the bomb which exploded in the hotel forecourt and killed 12 people on Aug 5.

Azahari, a 46-year-old British-educated former university professor, and a fellow Malaysian called Noordin Mohammad Top, are wanted both for the Marriott blast and for the Bali bombings, which killed 202 people in October 2002.