'No Qaeda Link Seen in Bali Suicide Bombings'

article by RAYMOND BONNER here.

 

JAKARTA, Indonesia, Oct. 6 - 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 Qaeda, giving the case echoes of the London subway bombings in July.

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"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 à la Israel," said a senior Western official who has closely monitored terrorist groups and activities for the last four years.

"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 condition that his name and country not be used, a condition imposed by most individuals of his position with access to intelligence information.

The threads between the London, Madrid and Bali attacks are not organizational, he said: "They are threads of the mind."

The terrorists have a common world view, a shared ideology. There is no evidence of 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 people's security and at the economy.