Bali bombers called newcomers to terror

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Indonesia's counterterrorism forces say the suspected suicide bombers who carried out the attack in Bali last Saturday appear to have been a small group with no prior criminal record or link to a large organization like al-Qaida, giving the case echoes of the London subway bombings in July.

A senior Indonesian counterterrorism official said in an interview on Thursday that the bombers seem to have been "jihadists" without previous involvement in terrorist acts that would have brought them to the attention of the authorities.

A former senior member of Jemaah Islamiyah, the radical Islamic organization here, who has defected and is helping the government, said he did not recognize any of the men, the official said. The heads of the presumed bombers were severed in the blast, and pictures of them have appeared on television and in the newspapers here. The official spoke on condition that he not be identified, because he is not the authorized spokesman for his agency.

The Bali attack, which killed 19 people, most of them Indonesians, in separate explosions at three restaurants, seems indicative of the way in which terrorism is shifting, terrorism experts say.

It was less sophisticated, complex, costly or deadly than the terrorist operation in Bali three years ago, in which a van loaded with explosives exploded in front of a nightclub, killing 202. And both the organizations that financed the earlier attack, al-Qaida and Jemaah Islamiyah, have been severely weakened.

Yet the terrorist threat remains while presenting a very different challenge than when al-Qaida was providing training, financing, and direction.

"Outside of the Middle East, and North Africa, this is the first time we have seen suicide bombers walk into a restaurant and blow themselves up a la Israel," said a senior Western official who has closely monitored terrorist groups and activities for the past four years. "People ought to take note of that."

"It is only a matter of time before what you saw in Bali on Saturday night happens in a Western country," he said. The official spoke on the condition that his name and country not be used, a condition imposed by most individuals of his position, and with access to intelligence information.

The threads between the London, Madrid, Spain and Bali attacks are not organizational, he said. "They are threads of the mind." The various terrorists have a common world view, a shared ideology. There is no evidence of any outside direction, he said, and that makes fighting them challenging in a different way. He argued further that small attacks could add up to a devastation equal in some ways to large catastrophic ones by eating away at economies and the public's sense of security.

These attacks should be seen less as a change in terrorists' tactics than "a demonstration of another capability," said a security adviser with experience in the public and private sectors.

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