Police link hotel bombs to Bali attacks
Explosive material recovered from the scene of two suicide bombings at hotels in the Indonesian capital is “identical” to that used by the Southeast Asian terrorist network Jemaah Islamiyah in earlier attacks, police said today.
An unexploded bomb left in a room of the J.W. Marriott in Jakarta resembled devices used in attacks on Bali and one found in a recent raid against the network on an Islamic boarding school in Central Java, national police spokesman told a news conference.
The culprits in Friday’s attacks that killed seven innocent people and wounded 50 are believed to have belonged to Jemaah Islamiyah “because there are similarities in the bombs used,” Major General Nanan Sukarna said.
The decapitated bodies of two alleged suicide bombers were also recovered at the blast scenes, police said.
Anti-terrorism police were hunting for Noordin Mohammad Top, a fugitive Malaysian who heads a particularly violent offshoot of the network and has been linked to four major strikes in Indonesia since 2002.
The twin suicide bombings at the J.W. Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels came four years after the last serious terrorist attack in Indonesia and unleashed a new wave of anxiety in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.
After years of sectarian violence and annual terrorist strikes, the nation of 235 million had been enjoying a period of stability.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was re-elected to a second term earlier this month, partly on the strength of government efforts to fight terrorism.
