JAKARTA, INDONESIA - THE Indonesian Attorney General's Office is conducting an internal corruption probe after the arrest of one of its top prosecutors allegedly caught accepting 660,000 dollars (S$911,263) in cash, an official said on Thursday.

'This is an internal probe that was started on Monday. So far we have questioned about 20 officials and staff members and on Thursday we will question three or four more,' M.S. Rahardjo, deputy head for supervision at the Attorney General's Office, told reporters.

The probe stems from the arrest early this month of prosecutor Urip Tri Gunawan near the home of Syamsul Nursalim, the banker who was the target of a case - headed by Gunawan - over missing billions in bank bailouts in the late 1990s.

Mr Gunawan was arrested while trying to leave Mr Nursalim's home in a car and was found with 660,000 dollars.

A close female associate of Mr Nursalim, who is believed to have handed Mr Gunawan the cash, was also arrested.

The case against Mr Nursalim was abandoned by the AGO late last month, just days before Mr Gunawan's arrest.

Ethical violations
Mr Rahardjo said the internal probe was aimed at seeing whether any other staff had made 'ethical' violations in connection with the case.

Criminal investigations into the case were in the hands of the country's Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), he added.

He declined to give names of those questioned but said that members of Gunawan's team of prosecutors in the Nursalim case were among them.

Attorney General Hendarman Supandji has said that the commission was free to question any of his officials if there were indications that they may be linked to the case.

The KPK grilled Gunawan's superior, the deputy attorney general for special crimes, Kemas Yahya Rahman, and the head of the attorney general's office supervision department, Muhammad Salim, as witnesses for hours on Wednesday, KPK spokesman Johan Budi told reporters.

He declined to elaborate further.

Mr Nursalim's Bank Dagang Negara Indonesia owes the government a total of 30.9 trillion rupiah (S$4.65 billion) in so-called liquidity funds handed out by the central bank in 1998 in the midst of the Asian economic crisis.

Bank assets confiscated and sold by the state to repay the debt only yielded about 1.8 trillion rupiah.

In dropping the investigation of Nursalim last month, Mr Rahman said the bank's inability to repay its debts could be excused due to the economic difficulties that followed the crisis, which began in 1997.

Bank Indonesia, the central bank, doled out almost 145 trillion rupiah during the crisis.

State auditors said that they have found that 80.4 trillion rupiah, distributed to 48 banks, was embezzled. -- AFP