BALI: The three explosions that ripped through restaurants on Bali killing more than 20 people and injuring more than 130 on Saturday night were caused by suicide bombers, the police chief on the Indonesian resort island said yesterday.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks on two beachside seafood restaurants in the village of Jimbaran and a cafe in the bustling town of Kuta, but the carefully co-ordinated strikes within minutes of each other bear the hallmarks of the region's two most-wanted terrorists, the Malaysians Azahari Husin and Noordin Top.
Both are senior members of Jemaah Islamiyah, a regional Islamist terrorist network linked to al-Qaeda, but are also known to operate independently of the movement's leadership.
Major Gen Made Mangku Pastika, the Bali police chief, released gruesome pictures of the three bombers' severed heads to corroborate his claim about suicide attackers and also released a holidaymaker's video which shows, in the background, a young, unassuming, Indonesian man wearing a black and grey knapsack walking into the Raja restaurant in Kuta and then being at the centre of an explosion.
"There are pieces from either a jacket or a bag that were attached to the bodies," he said. "The pieces from their torsos spattered in all directions." The general said the scenes at the other two locations, the Menegan and Nyoman restaurants in Jimbaran, were similar; the bombers' severed heads and feet had remained intact while the remaining parts of their bodies were ripped apart.
Investigators, who have not been able to identify any of the alleged perpetrators, believe the three bombs were made of the high explosive TNT and that they also contained ball bearings. They each weighed a maximum of 10kg.
The dead include three Australians, one Japanese and at least three other unidentified foreigners. Gen Pastika said the death toll was lower than the figure of 25 given by the hospital officials on Saturday evening, because several bags of body parts turned out to contain the remains of only a couple of victims. The restaurants attacked, although popular with foreigners, are more normally frequented by local people. Australians, South Koreans, Japanese, a German and a French person were among the wounded.
Gen Pastika said it was premature to draw links between this attack and any of the three big terrorist strikes in Indonesia in the past three years: the 2002 Bali bombings, the attack on the Marriott hotel in Jakarta the following year, and the suicide bombing outside the Australian embassy in September 2004.
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesia's president, visited the bombsites and the island's main hospital yesterday. He warned that terrorists could be planning more strikes in the world's most populous Muslim nation and vowed to bring the bombers' accomplices to justice and to tighten security across the country. "We will intensify our national effort in fighting terrorism," the president said.
But presidential aides said neither Bali nor the whole of Indonesia could be turned into a fortress. You can't put metal detectors everywhere. You have to be realistic," said Mr Yudhoyono's spokesman, Andi Mallarangeng.
- (Guardian Service)
There have been no reports of Irish citizens being injured in the bombings on the Indonesian resort of Bali, according to the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Anyone anxious about the safety of relatives in Bali can contact the department's emergency helplines on (01) 408 2308 or (01) 408 2833.