Jakarta - Indonesian police have arrested 70 migrants from Afghanistan seeking asylum in Australia, a police officer said Friday.

The Afghans were arrested late Thursday at a hotel in the resort area of Anyer in West Java, said Retno Windarti, an officer in the Cilegon district.

"They said they wanted to go to Australia - Indonesia is only a transit point," she said, adding that they had been taken to the immigration office.

Jakarta - A small plane crashed Friday in Indonesia's Papua province, but the fate of the 11 people on board was unknown, the state Antara news agency reported.

The plane was travelling from Ilaga to Mulia district when it crashed in a mountainous area, Antara said.

Among the nine passengers were officials of the local election commission and two children, the news agency said.

Police and officials could not be reached immediately for comment.

Jakarta, Apr. 17 : Muslims in Indonesia have been left outraged, following the discovery that Indonesia's popular dry-meat-product-selling companies were substituting beef with pork.

After conducting DNA tests on jerky samples from traditional markets in Java and Sumatra, Indonesia''s National Food and Drug Monitoring Agency BPOM found that five companies were deceiving Muslim sentiments by contaminating their products with pork.

Jakarta - Indonesia's Supreme Court said Thursday that it had overturned its own verdict that awarded ex-dictator Suharto 1 trillion rupiah (93 million dollars) in damages in a lawsuit he brought against the US-based magazine Time.

A panel of three Supreme Court judges accepted that a Time story published in May 1999 that alleged Suharto had stashed billions of dollars abroad was not defamatory, the court said in a statement posted on its website.

Hong Kong  - An Indonesian maid was in a Hong Kong jail Thursday awaiting trial for mixing her menstrual blood in a pot of vegetables she was cooking for her employer.

Indra Ningsih, 26, allegedly told police afterwards she mixed the blood into the meal in a superstitious effort to make her Chinese employer "more amiable and less picky" towards her.

Jakarta  - An undersea earthquake registering 6.4 on the Richter scale struck the western coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra early Thursday, but there were no immediate reports of injury or damage, the Indonesian seismologist agency said.

The quake struck at 3:01 am (2001 GMT Wednesday) and was centred in the Indian Ocean, 32 kilometres south-west of Mentawai Islands, off the western coast of Sumatra, Indonesia's National Meteorology and Geophysics Agency said in a statement.