Indonesian police found traces of the explosives used in the suicide bombing of the Australian Embassy inside a room rented by the two alleged masterminds of the attack, the national police chief said yesterday.
Police also released chilling security camera footage showing the small white delivery truck driving past the heavily fortified mission in Jakarta moments before it exploded, killing nine people and wounding more than 170. Police believe two of the dead were suicide bombers.
All those killed were believed to be Indonesians, some of them embassy guards.
The bombing, which came ahead of elections in both Indonesia and Australia, has been blamed on the al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah terror group, the same network implicated in the October 2002 Bali nightclub blasts and last year's attack on the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta.
Also yesterday, 1,000 members of the radical Islamic group Hizbut Thahrir rallied in a central Jakarta square to protest terrorism. Last year the group organized protests against the US-led invasion of Iraq.
The demonstrators carried banners reading: "Islam rejects terrorism!"
"We are deeply saddened by Thursday's bombing. We don't want to be labeled as a group that supports bombings," the group's spokesman, Ismail Yusanto, told reporters.
Police have said two Malaysians, Azahari bin Husin and Noordin Top, constructed the bomb used in Thursday's blast and recruited the militants who carried out the operation.
Indonesian police chief General Dai Bachtiar said officers had found traces of TNT and sulfur in a rented room used by the pair in west Jakarta, near the city's international airport.
He said the same substances were found at the scene of the bombing.
"We are still facing a terrorist threat, especially from Azahari and Noordin Top," Bachtiar said. "We are hunting them down."
He said police believed the two men had been planning to attack an anti-terror training center during an opening ceremony in July attended by President Megawati Sukarnoputri and Australian Justice Minister Chris Ellison.
"I think they just canceled the attack ... maybe they thought security was very tight," Bachtiar said.
The information about the planned attack came from interrogation of several alleged militants arrested on Java in June, he said.
Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty said a second group of suicide bombers may be at large in Jakarta, and that they could be planning another attack.
"Intelligence comes through all the time about threats and possible threats, and there's further intelligence in the last 24 to 48 hours of a second group," Keelty said before returning to Australia late Friday from Jakarta.
The footage released by police yesterday was taken from security cameras on two buildings opposite the mission. It shows passers-by and security guards milling outside the gate before a huge cloud of white smoke and debris envelops them.
The timing of the bombing one month before Australia's elections has led to speculation it may have been an attempt to influence the poll.
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