Blasts kill 32 at Indonesian tourist resort
Foreign Desk Report

JIMBARAN (Indonesia)—Bombs exploded in three packed tourist restaurants on the Indonesian island of Bali killing at least 32 people and injuring over 100, just days before the third anniversary of the nightclub attacks there. Police said two explosions ripped through beach-side seafood restaurants 100 metres (yards) apart in the fishing village of Jimbaran during the evening meal. Minutes later witnesses said at least one blast tore through the Raja restaurant 30 kilometres (18 miles) away in the shopping district of Kuta, the scene of the 2002 bombings which left 202 people dead, mostly foreign tourists.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono immediately condemned the latest outrage and vowed to hunt down the perpetrators. “These are clearly terrorist attacks because the targets were random and public places,” he said. The October 12, 2002 attacks were blamed on the Al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah and both analysts and governments were quick to blame the pan-Asian Islamic extremist group for the latest bombings.
A French diplomat who visited two hospitals in Bali on Saturday said at least 32 people had been confirmed dead and 101 had been injured in the blasts, which  came during the peak tourist season. At the scene of the Kuta bomb, bodies lay covered by bloodied blankets as police moved among crowds of onlookers using flashlights to pick their way through the gutted interior of the bomb-damaged restaurant.
British tourist Daniel Martin told the BBC he was standing in a building next to the restaurant in Kuta when a “tremendous” explosion erupted. “It was just sheer chaos with no one really taking control,” Martin said, adding that “there were no police or anyone else around for a good while. It was everyone pitching in to help the wounded. “There were people lying in the street with serious wounds, blood pouring into the street ... I was afraid to go into the actual restaurant for fear of what I might see in there.” An eyewitness who arrived at the scene in Jimbaran minutes after the explosion said he saw at least eight bodies, including four foreigners. “There are also lots of body parts,” Bagas Saputra said.
Television images from Sanglah hospital in the Bali capital Denpasar showed several foreign tourists, wearing nothing but shorts, being treated for injuries. Australia, which lost 88 citizens in the 2002 attacks, confirmed at least one national had been killed and three others injured. “You can assume it’s an attack by an organisation like Jemaah Islamiyah, just speaking from experience, but of course at this stage no one has claimed responsibility,” said Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.
Indonesian reports listed at least one Japanese national killed and five Koreans injured. A British foreign minister, Lord Treisman, told Britain’s Sky News that US, Australian, Japanese and Korean tourists were among the injured. Rohan Gunaratna, head of terrorism research at Singapore’s Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, told the Indonesian government should now formally ban the JI as a criminal or terrorist group.
“The only group that has the intention and capability to mount a coordinated and simultaneous attack against a Western target in Indonesia is Jemaah Islamiyah,” he said. President Yudhoyono had called in late August for tighter security in the world’s most populous Muslim nation during September and October, saying these appeared to be favoured months for terrorist acts.
He said the possibility of more attacks remained real since two of the key bombers accused of being behind the 2002 Bali attacks, Malaysians Azahari Husin and Noordin Mohammad Top, remained on the loose. Both are believed to have played key roles in the Bali bombings, the August 2003 bomb blast at the Marriott hotel in Jakarta and the suicide van bomb blast in front of the Australian embassy in September 2004.
All the attacks are blamed on Jemaah Islamiyah which has been accused of having close links to Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network and aims to set up an Islamic state across a vast swathe of Southeast Asia. Three militants have been sentenced to death for their part in the Bali bombings and two others are serving life sentences for the attacks.