Ten people were injured on Friday when a parcel bomb exploded outside the Indonesian embassy in Paris, the first such attack in the French capital for nearly a decade.
The device, planted beside an outside wall of the three-storey, 19th-century building in the smart 16th arrondissement, exploded just after 5am, blowing out windows up to 100m away, damaging nearby vehicles and leaving a small crater in the pavement.
Most of those wounded were hit by flying shards. They were treated in hospital and later allowed home. Three were relatives of an embassy guard who were staying in the mission’s basement.
The French Interior Minister, Dominique de Villepin, described the bombing as ”an act with criminal intentions”, but stopped short of calling it a terrorist act.
”Our investigation will help verify some points,” he said. ”We obviously have to wait before reaching any conclusions.”
However, Indonesia’s President-elect, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, went further, saying: ”I strongly condemn the terrorist act committed at the Indonesian embassy in Paris.”
He added: ”I hope the government of France will take appropriate action to bring the perpetrators to justice.”
French officials could not explain why the embassy had been targeted. De Villepin called an emergency meeting with police and anti-terrorism officials, and security was tightened at embassies and other sensitive sites in Paris.
France, which has been on high security alert since the September 11 al-Qaeda attacks in the United States, was last the target of a big terrorist campaign in the mid-1990s, when Algerian Islamic radicals launched a series of bombings on the metro, killing 10 people.
Several more recent plots have been foiled, including a plan by Algerian extremists to bomb Strasbourg’s Christmas market on New Year’s Eve 2000, and the attempt in December 2001 by the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, to blow up a Paris-Miami flight with explosives hidden in his trainers.
The French Foreign Minister, Michel Barnier, expressed solidarity with Indonesia.
”This reinforces our determination to fight terrorism in all its forms,” he said, adding that ”no person and no city is safe” from this kind of attack.
French President Jacques Chirac, speaking on a visit to Vietnam, said ”every available means” will be used to track down the perpetrators.
In Jakarta, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said no warning had been given.
”As no one has claimed responsibility for the blast, I urge people not to jump to conclusions,” he said. All Indonesian embassies around the world have been placed on the highest alert.
The country has suffered several terrorist attacks in recent years. Most are blamed on separatist groups such as the Free Aceh Movement or on Jemaah Islamiah, a radical Islamist group seen as al-Qaeda’s regional arm and held responsible for the nightclub bombings in Bali two years ago that killed 202 people.
However, security analysts felt that the location and small size of Friday’s device suggests another culprit. The Free Aceh Movement, for instance — fighting for an independent homeland in northern Sumatra — has never taken its struggle outside Indonesia and is thought unlikely to want to antagonise Yudhoyono before he takes office.
Ken Conboy, of the Risk Management Advisory company in Jakarta, said: ”A personal grievance against someone in the embassy is as good a scenario as any. But nothing can be ruled out.”
One of the injured, Teguh Juniarto, told Indonesian television he had been asleep in a room 3m from the blast.
”Windows smashed and I woke to see one of my hands bleeding,” he said. ”I thought it was a huge explosion.” — Guardian Unlimited Â