Indonesia yesterday admitted it had known for weeks that the area including the hotel in Tuesday’s car bomb attack was on a terrorist hit list.
Security chiefs recognised that failings in intelligence agencies meant there could be more attacks.
The Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer, said Australia had had no specific information about an attack before the bombing of the American-run JW Marriott Hotel but warned Indonesia to expect further attacks.
”We have particular concerns at the moment about central Jakarta, but also other places in Indonesia. There could be a further terrorist attack in the next day or so,” Downer said. ”August 17 is Indonesia’s National Day when we think there could be a terrorist attack in the central Jakarta area.”
Detectives insisted they had reacted to intelligence before the blast by increasing patrols and heightening security in neighbourhood of the hotel.
The death toll from the blast was officially put at 10 after the Red Cross withdrew its figure of 13. The government said there were strong indications the bombers were members of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), the regional Islamist terrorist network linked to al-Qaeda. It also announced stricter nationwide security measures and called for greater international cooperation to fight terrorism.
A Jakarta police spokesperson said the target list was found during a raid in Semarang, Central Java, last month in which officers arrested seven alleged JI members.
”There was a warning that there were some targets and we have been anticipating an attack,” he said. ”In the documents there were some strategic areas including the location of the Marriott.”
In that raid and one at the same time in Bali, the location of last October’s bombing that killed 202 people, officers seized four boxes of TNT, 25 sacks of potassium chlorate — the chemical used in Bali –and 1 200 detonators.
The national police chief, General Da’i Bachtiar, said the bomb was a mixture of low explosives, TNT and the high explosive RDX.
The chief security minister, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, said the perpetrators were part of an international terrorist network.
”What we’re facing is an international terrorist organisation, it’s not domestic terrorist cells. Even though Indonesia does its best to deter, to prevent and to detect terrorism, better and closer international cooperation is needed.”
Officers from Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines are helping with the investigation.
While denying that the bombing was the result of a specific intelligence failing, Yudhoyono accepted that the country was not able to counter the growing terrorist threat. ”We need to improve our intelligence capacity and capability,” he said. This was particularly important because the threat of further attacks was very real.
”International intelligence officials say Jemaah Islamiyah and al-Qaeda will conduct fresh attacks,” he said, highlighting the August 17 Independence Day celebrations and a summit of regional leaders in Bali in October as potential target dates.
The three measures the government announced yesterday to reduce the likelihood of further major attacks are the tightening of security at all government buildings, private offices and public premises; greater community cooperation to deter terrorists and the improvement of the intelligence and security agencies’ ability to anticipate attacks.
”The government cannot combat terrorism alone,” he said. ”The whole nation has to come together to beat this menace.”
General Bachtiar said forensic experts had recovered a badly burned male head near the Toyota Kijang minivan used in the bombing and that surgeons are attempting to ”reconstruct the face”. ”When they have done this we will issue a sketch,” he said. ”We strongly suspect that [this person] is linked with the bomb.”
Detectives are also planning to soon release an image of the person who allegedly bought the seven-year-old Kijang two weeks ago for 26m rupiah (£1 900). He said the similarities with the Bali bombing extended to the perpetrators trying to erase the chassis and engine serial numbers. ”But they failed and we were able to recover them,” he said.
One Dutchman is among the dead, and several foreigners but no Britons were among the 150 injured. – Guardian Unlimited Â