He was caught on a bus that was about to board a ferry for Sumatra.Police believe Mr Samudra, a 35-year-old engineer, chose the targets – two nightclubs frequented by Western tourists in Kuta Beach – and led the planning for the attack. Samudra, who is thought to have received explosives training in Afghanistan, is also suspected of helping to make the bombs that went off at the Sari Club and Paddy’s Bar on 12 October.His arrest followed the detention of Amrozi, a key member of the terrorist cell, who was picked up in east Java two weeks ago Many Indonesians use only one name. Amrozi, a mechanic, has given police a wealth of information including names of other suspects and details of how the blasts were executed. He has admitted that he obtained the bomb-making materials and owned the van that was left outside the Sari Club, packed with explosives.Mr Samudra, however, is a much bigger catch. Suspected of involvement in a string of church bombings across Indonesia in 2000, he was identified by police on Sunday as the mastermind of the Bali attack. He is believed to have been acting on the orders of Jamaah Islamiya’s operations chief, Riduan Isamuddin, also known as Hambali. Police say he remained in Bali for four days afterwards, observing the investigation.The Indonesian police chief, Da’i Bachtiar, said Mr Samudra had offered no resistance when arrested and was not carrying a weapon.

He could provide valuable insights into the workings of Jamaah Islamiya, which has been linked with al-Qa’ida and is suspected of planning a series of attacks against Western interests across South-east Asia.Mr Samudra taught at a religious school in southern Malaysia in the early 1990s that was run by Jamaah Islamiya’s spiritual leader, Abu Bakar Bashir. Mr Bashir, a radical Indonesian cleric, is in custody suspected of involvement in the church bombings. However, he has not been named as a suspect in the Bali attack.Amrozi is alleged to have met Mr Samudra and others in Bali six days before the bombing Police are searching for seven other named suspects. Two people arrested in a village in Banten province yesterday were Mr Samudra’s bodyguards, according to one television channel.It was apparently the bodyguards who led police to their target, who had long been on a police wanted list because of the church bombings.”We have been scouring Banten for months but we never revealed [this search].

Finally, he appeared and we caught him,” Banten police chief Abdurrachman said.. A plan dating from the 1970s to build a gigantic system of canals linking India’s rivers in an effort to break the nation’s debilitating pattern of drought and flood has been given new impetus by the Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The issue was spending it properly.His remarks are an endorsement of ambitious plans, drawn up by India’s National Water Development Agency, for a network of canals, dams and reservoirs that would transfer water from India’s wettest areas to its driest.The idea, which has been on the drawing board in India for three decades, partly represents an attempt to end the feuding between India’s states over access to water, aggravated by its punishing climatic conditions – from extreme heat to monsoons, cyclones and floods. A legal battle has been raging in the south between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka over the Cauvery river.Last month India’s Water Resources Minister, Arjan Chanan Sethi, said under the plan surplus water from rivers starting in the Himalayan mountains, which flow along most parts of eastern India, would be diverted to the peninsular river system in the south.”When surplus waters from rivers in eastern India get diverted to deficit areas down in the south and in the north, it would ease the floods as well as solve the drought problem across the country,” he said.At least one billion rupees (£12.6m) has already been spent on the preliminary studies.

However, the scheme’s critics point out that many obstacles lie in its path – from funding, to displacing of people, and the acquisition of land.Plans to link India’s vast and ancient rivers, whose waters are considered sacred and spiritually purifying by Hindus, were first drawn up in 1972 when India was casting around for a solution to a problem that was causing misery to many millions each year, as well as severe economic damage.The problem has less to do with a lack of water than uneven distribution. Nearly two thirds of India’s water resources flow from the Himalayas into the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna basins in the east, where floods are endemic.At the same time, large parts of the country – including Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu – are parched. This year they are enduring a drought that is so severe that farmers have been committing suicide and a handful of people have died from starvation, although the latter is because of a break-down in India’s food distribution systems. In August, the Minister of Farming, Ajit Singh, said that the country’s drought was the worst in 15 years.The position is expected to worsen over the years as India tries to grow more food to feed its population, which has already crossed the one billion mark and increases by the thousands every day.In 1986, the Ministry of Water Resources scaled down the 1972 river-linking plan, but it remains an enormous project that would require at least 35 years to build. Estimates of the cost run into many billions of pounds.Mr Vajpayee’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, said this month that the river-linking project should go ahead urgently.