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KUTA, Indonesia, Monday, Oct. 3 - 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.
Raymond Bonner reported from Kuta for this article and Jane Perlez from
Jakarta. Muktita Suhartono contributed reporting from Kuta.
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