Michelle Leslie, the Minister's Son, the controversial resort, and the rave at the religious theme park

Well, it seems that Islamic underwear model (sic.) Michelle Leslie was in a Toyota Kijang bearing the logo of the Bali Nirwana in Tabanan with the son of its owner, Aburizal Bakrie (pictured), the Minister for Economics when the police opened her purse to begin the nightmare of Mia's ecstasy pills having been popped in there and Mia disappearing, apparently surnameless.

Now that hotel is a controversial one. I struck on a rich vein of interesting commentary on Bali in this article, which explains one moment of the controversy over the creation of the little empire (not much loved incidentally by the Global Anti-Golf Movement):

"It was, in fact, an act of desecration which finally brought former landholders into open opposition. A few days after approval was granted to resume construction in September 1994, a shrine on rice-land already appropriated for the project was bulldozed despite guarantees of protection by the project managers. The farmers' relative silence throughout the public protests of 1993-4 had been a weak link in the opposition movement and allowed the BNR to claim that local people had been consulted and that the majority had sold out willingly for reasonable compensation and job assurances. Several days after the incident, 96 former landholders presented a petition to the head of the regional parliament asserting that they had been deceived and forced into selling their land. They demanded cancellation of the project so that the land could 'be managed with care and ceremonial treatment as before ... and so that we and our families are not faulted for the wrong and improper use of these ancestral lands'. They asserted they had been led to believe the land was being resumed for development 'in the national interest', only to find it appropriated to a private project. Their irrigation water had been cut off, and those who resisted selling had their lives threatened and their land impounded by the court."

What's really weird is that she was picked up at the Mandala Garuda Wisnu Kencana, another controversial Balinese tourist development of gigantic proportions on the Bukit Peninsula down near Jimbaran Bay, Nusa Dua, and Uluwatu Temple, and the second case study of controversial tourism developments in the article linked to above.

So an underwear model who was a closet Muslim was about to go to a rave at a privately owned Hindu theme park all the while thinking she had no party drugs, when lo and behold the police found that those two pills Mia had given her were in fact -- wait for it, party drugs. Curiouser and curiouser, just like the police's explanation the other day for why they could no longer remeber who was in the Kijang with Michelle: "We searched a lot of beautiful women that night".

The site linked to with the words "Michelle Leslie" above is the "unofficial Michelle Leslie support site". It does not mention that the two pills containing amphetamines were ecstacy, and suggests that Ritalin prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which contains amphetamines, explains why her blood tested positive for them. Bali