Bodies hold clues to Bali bombers
Police display gruesome pictures of bodiless heads Malaysians linked to Al Qaeda believed masterminds
KUTA, INDONESIA—
In the first 24 hours after a series of bombs killed 22 people in a restaurant on a busy street and in two restaurants on a nearby beach, investigators in Bali have made rapid progress, in part owing to a macabre bit of luck. As they sifted through bodies and body parts, they found the heads of three men and three sets of legs, with no middles, the forensic signature of suicide bombings. One head was more than 25 metres from the rest of the body. The blasts Saturday evening did not obliterate the faces of the bodiless heads, so the police were able to display vivid, gruesome photographs of them at a news conference here yesterday, and the photographs were shown on television and in today’s newspapers. The likelihood of identifications from the public seemed high. The Bali police chief, Made Pastika, revised the death toll downward from an estimate of 25, saying that the three bombers had killed themselves and 19 others — 14 Indonesians and five foreigners. Of the more than 90 wounded, nearly all were Indonesian, he said.
At least seven of the wounded were Americans, and three were Canadians, who were treated in hospital and released.
Pastika said the police were searching for three other men believed to be involved in the bombings.
There is a possibility that a faction of the militant group Jemaah Islamiyah, led by a pair of Malaysian men who have become the most wanted fugitives in Southeast Asia, may be responsible, terrorism experts said.
Indonesian authorities also did not rule out the possibility of more attacks.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono warned that terrorists could be planning more strikes in Indonesia, and police commanders in Jakarta, the capital, ordered two- thirds of its force to remain on standby.
“ The terrorists are still looking for soft targets,” the president said yesterday after touring the bombing scenes in Bali.
Pastika showed a video, taken by a visiting family, that showed a man with a backpack walking into Raja’s restaurant and then the giant flash of an explosion. Each of the three bombs, he said, held as much as 10 kilograms of dynamite, and may have been carried in backpacks or in suicide vests.
It was not known yet how they
were detonated — by
remote control, or triggers pulled by the suicide bombers.
Pastika said the investigators had not concluded who was responsible, but he noted the similarity to the 2002 attacks on nightclubs here that killed 202 people. Those attacks were the work of Jemaah Islamiyah, Indonesian and U. S. officials have said. The group is considered the Southeast Asia surrogate for Al Qaeda.
In the last few years, Indonesian police have arrested scores of the organization’s most militant members, and the arrests severely weakened Jemaah Islamiyah, according to Sidney Jones, an expert on the group and the director of the Jakarta office of the International Crisis Group.
While the mainstream of the group has forsaken terrorism, she said, a breakaway faction remains committed to terrorist acts against the U.S. and the West and has the ability and desire to carry them out.
That faction is headed by Azhari Husin, a Malaysian educated in Britain, and Mohammad Noordin Top, also a Malaysian, who is thought to have been the mastermind behind the attack on the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in August 2003, she said. The two men were also behind an attack on the Australian Embassy in September 2004.