Jakarta  - Indonesian police named the female leader of a controversial cult as a suspect for religious blasphemy Tuesday, an offence punishable by up to five years in prison.

Lia Aminuddin, the leader of the "Kingdom of Eden," was brought to the Jakarta city police headquarters on Monday for distributing anti-religious leaflets urging the disbanding of all religions, including Islam.

Police also took 23 other people, including 11 children, to the Jakarta police headquarters for questioning, the Suara Pembaruan daily reported.

Jakarta - South-East Asian foreign ministers Monday formalized a charter that transforms the 41-year-old bloc of half a billion people into a a more united community.

The charter sets out rules of membership, transforms the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) into a legal entity and proposes a single free trade area by 2015.

"Today, the ASEAN Charter officially entered into force," Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono told the meeting at the ASEAN secretariat in Jakarta. "This is a momentous development at a time when ASEAN is consolidating, integrating and transforming itself into a community."

Jakarta- Indonesian police seized more than 6 kilograms of heroin and arrested two people in one of the biggest drug hauls in the country this year, police said Friday.

The heroin was seized when police raided a house in the eastern Jakarta suburb of Cipinang on Thursday night, said Brigadier General Harry Montolalu, director of the anti-drugs unit at national police headquarters.

Jakarta  - An earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale struck off Indonesia's North Sulawesi province Friday morning, seismologists said.

The quake's epicentre lay about 101 kilometres south-east of Gorontalo in northern Sulawesi at about 4:40 am Jakarta time (2140 GMT Thursday), and occurred about 95 kilometres beneath the seabed, the National Meteorology and Geophysics Agency (BMG) said.

Jakarta  - Former Indonesian foreign minister Ali Alatas died on Thursday at the age of 76, officials and media reports said.

Alatas, who served as Indonesia's foreign minister from 1988 and 1999, passed away at Singapore's Mount Elizabeth Hospital at about 7:30 am (0030 GMT) after he was hospitalised on November 24, Foreign Ministry spokesman Teuku Faizasyah said.

However, Faizasyah declined to go into details about the former top diplomat's illness. He added that preparations are underway to fly Alatas' body to Jakarta from Singapore.

Jakarta - A 2-year-old Indonesian girl died from bird flu, raising the country's world-leading death toll from the H5N1 virus to 113, while another 9-year old girl has been infected by the virus, the health ministry said Wednesday.

The girl from the Indonesian capital Jakarta died on November 29 after developing symptoms on November 18, ministry spokeswoman Lily Sriwahyuni said.

She said the girl was brought to Jakarta's Omni Medical Centre on November 26, before being sent to the Sulianti Saroso Hospital, which is designated to treat bird flu patients in the capital, on November 29. She died one day later.