3 Suicide Bombers Carried Out Bali Attacks, Police Say

Bali police released grisly photos Sunday of the heads of three men suspected of carrying out suicide bomb attacks here, as well as an eerie video of one of the suspects walking into a steakhouse wearing what appears to be a backpack and blowing up.

“We have reached a conclusion that they were suicide bombings,” Bali Police Chief I Made Mangku Pastika said.

The disclosures came less than 24 hours after the blasts and added to mounting evidence that the triple bombing had been carried out by the same Islamic extremist group that has been conducting suicide bomb attacks in Indonesia over the last three years.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono briefly toured the bomb sites and said Indonesia needed to find a way to protect “soft” targets such as restaurants and nightclubs from extremists willing to sacrifice their own lives.

“So far, our investigation indicates that this attack was done by terrorist suicide bombers,” the president said. “For sure, there has to be some way to prevent bombings in open areas like last night.”

The death toll from the blasts remained uncertain Sunday as authorities handled the gruesome job of sorting body parts. Officials at Sanglah Hospital, where most victims were taken, said 23 people had been killed in the blasts along with the three suspected bombers.

The police chief, however, said there had been some double-counting at the hospital and that only 19 had died, in addition to the suspected killers.

Five of the dead appeared to be foreigners, including two Australians and one Japanese citizen. Six Americans were among more than 100 reported injured.

Authorities were having difficulty determining how many had died at each restaurant, in part because victims from all three locations had been taken to the same hospital without a clear record of where they had come from.

Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, is generally a tolerant nation. It had little experience with suicide bombers until three years ago, when members of Jemaah Islamiah, an extremist Muslim group linked to Al Qaeda, blew up two Bali nightclubs, killing 202 people.

Some Indonesians initially were reluctant to accept the idea that suicide bombers, a product of the turmoil of the Middle East, had arrived in Indonesia. But the phenomenon became irrefutable in 2003 with the car bombing of the Jakarta J.W. Marriott Hotel, in which the bomber’s severed head flew into an empty guest room several floors up. The car bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta last year also was the work of a suicide attacker.

In Saturday night’s bombings, police said evidence indicated that the three bombers had entered the restaurants in Kuta and on Jimbaran Beach with explosives in backpacks or strapped to their bodies.

The first bomb ripped through the Menega seafood cafe on Jimbaran Beach at 7:40 p.m. The second went off at 7:41 p.m. down the beach at the Nyoman cafe. The third exploded at 7:45 p.m. at Raja’s restaurant 18 miles away in Kuta.

Jemaah Islamiah is known for carrying out nearly simultaneous bombings. On Oct. 12, 2002, one attacker walked into Paddy’s Bar on Bali wearing a bomb that exploded inside the club. A van with a second suicide bomber and a powerful fertilizer bomb was parked outside. As the crowd fled, the car bomb exploded, destroying the nearby Sari Club.

Pastika, the police chief, who introduced the video of the Raja’s bombing at a news conference, said the similarity between the restaurant attack and the first nightclub bombing was striking.

“We compare between Paddy’s and here, and it is exactly the same,” said Pastika, who headed the 2002 bombing investigation.

He would not reveal the identity of the person who made the video, but said he was a customer who had happened to be taping in the restaurant. He was injured in the explosion, but came forward Sunday morning to offer the video, Pastika said.

The brief footage showed a man wearing a backpack going in the door and walking past tables to the back of the restaurant, where he barely remained in the frame. The video ends a moment later with a bright flash as the bomb detonates.

The photographs that Pastika released of the suspected bombers added further evidence to support the contention that they were suicide attackers. In all three cases, the heads and lower extremities were separated from their torsos, suggesting that they were wearing explosives on their bodies.

The facial features of all three men are recognizable, and police hope that releasing the photos will lead to their identification. A photo of one man’s head shows an arm and shoulder still attached.

“There are pieces from either a jacket or a bag that were attached to the bodies,” Pastika said. “The pieces from their torsos spattered in all directions.”

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Dinda Jouhana of The Times’ Jakarta Bureau contributed to this report.