The United States and Australia have told their nationals to stay away from soft targets in Indonesia like international hotels or shopping centres, saying new intelligence pointed to a risk of fresh attacks.
Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and the US ambassador to Indonesia, Ralph Boyce, delivered their warnings in the wake of the August 5 car bomb that killed 12 people at the American-run JW Marriott hotel in the capital Jakarta.
Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, meanwhile, said it would look at ways to strengthen anti-terror laws introduced after last October's Bali nightclub bombings that killed 202 people, most of them foreign tourists.
"Yesterday evening we got some additional information in relation to possible attacks on international hotels in Jakarta and also shopping centres that are used by Westerners and other locations that are used by Westerners," Downer told reporters.
"We have particular concerns at this time in relation to those potential so-called soft targets," he added, speaking in the Australian capital Canberra.
Ambassador Boyce told American nationals at a private meeting in the heavily guarded US embassy complex in Jakarta that they should be on their guard wherever they were in the sprawling archipelago of more than 210 million people.
Australia, a staunch ally of the United States in its war on terrorism, sees itself as a likely target for a repeat of the devastating attacks that killed around 3,000 people in the United States on September 11, 2001.
"There is a genuine concern that a catastrophic attack is a certainty and only a matter of time -- a point on which I am inclined to agree," said Dennis Richardson, director general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).
"The fact that we are in close alliance with the U.S. and the fact that we were early and actively engaged in the war on terrorism does contribute to us being a target," he added in comments first made at an off-the-record briefing last week but released publicly in a statement late on Tuesday.