SECURITY camera footage has revealed the probable identity of the attacker who destroyed a hotel in Jakarta, killing ten people, Indonesian police said yesterday.

Brigadier General Gorries Mere, a senior Indonesian detective, said that a man called Asmal was the probable driver of a van packed with explosives that blew up outside the Marriott Hotel on Tuesday.

A colleague said that a hotel security camera showed the van in the driveway before it exploded. “Because the car stopped, two security guards approached it. Before they could ask the driver to move his car, the bomb exploded,” Brigadier General Nanan Sukarna, Jakarta’s deputy police chief, said in an interview with the Koran Tempo newspaper. Brigadier Mere said police had intercepted an e-mail from Asmal six weeks ago in which he expressed a desire to launch a suicide attack.

He said that the message included coded terms used by Jemaah Islamiyah, giving potentially the strongest clue yet that the terrorist group was involved in the bombing.

Brigadier Mere said police would take DNA samples from members of Asmal’s family and attempt to match them with remains found in the van.

Indonesian police yesterday arrested two people for possession of explosives, but said that reports linking them to the hotel blast and other bombings were premature.

The US Embassy in Jakarta said the United States would give $500,000 (£310,000) in assistance to the victims and families of Tuesday’s attack “in an effort to help Indonesia to recover from the event”.

Alexander Downer, the Australian Foreign Minister, praised the Indonesian investigators for their “rapid progress”.

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