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| Southeast Asia |
| Macabre clues advance Bali investigation |
| 2005-10-03 |
| In the first 24 hours after a series of bombs killed 22 people in a restaurant on a busy street and in two beachfront restaurants five miles away, investigators in Bali made rapid progress on Sunday, in part owing to a macabre bit of luck. As they sifted through bodies and body parts, they say, 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 75 feet from the rest of the body. The blasts on Saturday evening did not obliterate the faces, so the police were able to display vivid, gruesome photographs of them at a news conference here on Sunday evening, and the photographs were shown on television and in Monday 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 other people - 14 Indonesians and 5 foreigners. Of the more than 90 wounded, nearly all were Indonesian, he said. At least seven of the wounded were Americans, all from one San Francisco family eating in Raja's, a restaurant in Kuta, when a bomb went off there. The seven were expected to be released from a hospital here later Monday. Mr. Pastika said that the police were searching for three other men believed to be involved in the bombings, and that a faction of the militant group Jemaah Islamiyah might be responsible. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono warned that terrorists could be planning more strikes, and police commanders in Jakarta, the capital, ordered two-thirds of their forces to remain on standby. "The terrorists are still looking for soft targets," the president said Sunday after touring the bombing scenes in Bali. Mr. Pastika presented a video, taken by a visiting family, that showed a man with a backpack walking into Raja's and then the giant flash of an explosion. Each of the three bombs, he said, held as much as 22 pounds of dynamite, and they might have been carried in backpacks or in suicide vests. It was not known if they were detonated remotely or by triggers set off by the suicide bombers. Mr. Pastika said the investigators had not concluded who was responsible, but he noted the similarity to two bombings seconds apart at nightclubs here in October 2002 that killed 202 people. Those attacks were the work of Jemaah Islamiyah, Indonesian and American officials have said. The group is considered the Southeast Asia surrogate for Al Qaeda. But Mr. Pastika said there was no evidence of Qaeda involvement in the bombings on Saturday. In the past few years, the Indonesian police have arrested scores of Jemaah Islamiyah's most militant members, and the arrests severely weakened the group, according to Sidney Jones, the pre-eminent expert on the group and, more broadly, terrorism in Southeast Asia. While the group's mainstream members have forsaken terrorism, she said, a breakaway faction remains committed to terrorist acts against the West, and the United States in particular. That faction is headed by Azhari Husin, a Malaysian educated in Britain, and Muhammad Noordin Top, also a Malaysian, who is thought to have been the mastermind behind the deadly attack on the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in August 2003, she said. The two men, who have become the most-wanted fugitives in Southeast Asia, are also believed to have been behind an attack on the Australian Embassy in September 2004. Mr. Pastika said they were possibly behind the attacks on Saturday. As frequently happens in cases of terrorist attacks, rumor and contradictory reports colored the day on Sunday. Besides revising the death toll, Mr. Pastika denied a report that three unexploded devices had been found in Jimbaran, where two bombs had detonated in beach restaurants. The wounded were being treated at the Sanglah hospital. In one room was the Ly family of San Francisco. The Lys had relatively slight injuries, mostly cuts to their legs. Soviana Suprato Ly, 38, an Indonesian who became an American citizen in 1988, said they were on a homecoming visit and came to Bali on Friday after 10 days in Jakarta. On Saturday, the Lys went on a sightseeing tour, then ended the day at the popular beach resort of Kuta. "We wanted to see the beautiful sunset at Kuta," Ms. Ly said, sitting with her 16-year-old son, Sean. Then, she said, they began looking for a place to eat. "Father wanted noodles, and the children wanted spaghetti and burgers." They spotted Raja's. The family sat down on the first floor of Raja's, a three-story building, and heard a "big explosion" on the second floor, Ms. Ly said. "We got scared; we saw everything dark," she said. "I saw my dad under all the stones and tables." "Why did they do this to us?" she cried. Around her in the same hospital room, the other family members lay on beds. In one, her father, 70-year-old Jusof, nursed his wounds. Sean was connected to an intravenous tube, and her youngest son, Jeremy, 4, had a patch on his head. The attacks came as Bali, a Hindu enclave in an overwhelmingly Muslim nation, was steadily recovering from the slump in tourism that followed the 2002 bombings. Tourism is the main source of income for Bali. On Sunday afternoon, 60 Hindu monks, dressed in flowing white, performed a ceremony in front of Raja's, which is wedged between a McDonald's and a Kentucky Fried Chicken. They offered food to the spirits of the dead. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #5 Errr, That should be page 5. |
| Posted by: Thairong Clack2550 2005-10-03 09:17 |
| #4 Here's a link to the images |
| Posted by: Thairong Clack2550 2005-10-03 09:13 |
| #3 If only the smell could be also presented, no one would ever forget - nor forgive these animals. Bashir the simpering JI Spiritual Leader should die this way, burned from the toes up, inch by inch, self-cauterizing, excessively slowly - so he can know the smell intimately before he dies. |
| Posted by: .com 2005-10-03 03:18 |
| #2 RD: If you lack imagination, here is a graphic example. I guess you could say he died with his boots on. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-10-03 01:50 |
| #1 As they sifted through bodies and body parts, they say, 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 75 feet from the rest of the body. If you lack imagination, here is a graphic example. talked to a Sri Lankan [Buddhist] friend today he said this about Indonesian Muslims killers. "They wave and greet you in the morning but they smile when they kill you at night." btw the whole family are proven friends, an inspiration for me. |
| Posted by: Red Dog 2005-10-03 01:08 |
