Death toll rises in Bali bomb blasts

Suicide bombers wearing explosive vests targeted tourist resorts on Bali with coordinated attacks that devastated three crowded restaurants on the Indonesian resort island, killing at least 26 people and wounding dozens of others, officials said today.

Authorities named two al-Qaida-linked Malaysian fugitives suspected of masterminding the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings as the likely culprits behind the latest carnage, which has raised doubts about the success of a regional crackdown on the Southeast Asian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah.

No-one claimed responsibility for Saturday night’s attack. But officials in Indonesia and elsewhere laid the blame squarely with Jemaah Islamiyah, whose members were convicted of the attacks on nightclubs in Bali in 2002 that killed 202 people.

The latest blasts struck two seafood cafes in the Jimbaran beach resort and a three-storey noodle and steak restaurant in downtown Kuta. Kuta is the bustling tourist centre of Bali, where two nightclubs were bombed three years ago killing 202 people.

Major General Ansyaad Mbai said: “The modus operandi of Saturday’s attacks is the same as the earlier ones.”

He identified the two suspected masterminds as Azahari bin Husin and Noordin Mohamed Top.

He said they were not believed to be among the three suicide attackers, although the assailants have not yet been identified.

“By the evidence we can conclude the bombers were carrying the explosives around their waists,” he added.

It was not immediately clear whether the three suicide bombers were included in the death toll which, according to Sanglah Hospital spokesman Putu Putra Wisada, climbed to 26 this morning.

Two Australians, two Americans and a Japanese man were among those killed, along with at least 12 Indonesians. Officials were trying to identify the nationalities of the other corpses in the morgue, a hospital statement said.

The 101 wounded included 49 Indonesians, 17 Australians, six Americans, six Koreans, and four Japanese, officials said.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who immediately blamed terrorists for the attack, was on Bali to look at the devastation firsthand and vowed to hunt down the perpetrators and “bring them to justice”.

Earlier he had warned that more attacks were possible, saying he had received information last month “that terrorists were planning an action in Jakarta and that explosives were ready”.

Dozens of people, most of them Indonesian, waited outside the morgue in Sanglah Hospital, near the island’s capital city, Denpasar, for news of friends and relatives missing since the attacks.

Several coffins were carried out, one of them for a child.

The bombers struck at about 8pm as diners floked to restaurants.

The head waiter at the Menega Café said the bomb went off at his beachside restaurant between the tables of two large dinner parties, who were sitting in the sand. Most of the 120 diners at the restaurant were Indonesian, he said.

Minutes later he heard another blast at the Nyoman seafood restaurant, about 50 yards away.

At almost the same time about three miles away in Kuta, a bomb exploded at the Raja restaurant in an outdoor shopping centre. The bomb apparently went off on the restaurant’s second floor.