By TOM WRIGHT
JAKARTA -- The explosions that ripped through Jakarta's JW Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels on Friday raised new concerns about the growing sophistication of terrorists in Asia and the possibility that suicide bombers may have been purposefully targeting a meeting of largely Western businessmen.
Police are still investigating the nearly simultaneous suicide attacks, which killed nine people and injured 53 others after the bombers apparently smuggled bomb parts into the hotel disguised as laptops. Although police haven't officially named any suspects, intelligence experts, analysts and investigators say that Noordin Mohammad Top, a 40-year-old member of the al- Qaeda-backed Jemaah Islamiyah network, or terrorists linked to him, are now the leading suspects in masterminding the attacks.
The Associated Press Sunday cited reports that the Indonesian government was intensifying efforts to find Mr. Noordin and had enlisted help from authorities in Malaysia, where Mr. Noordin lived until earlier this decade.
The attack had many of the hallmarks of a Jemaah Islamiyah operation, analysts said, and Indonesian police said an undetonated bomb found in room 1808 of the JW Marriott -- which police believe the bombers used as their base -- was almost identical to a cache of bombs found recently at a house owned by Mr. Noordin's father-in-law in Cilacap, central Java. The Marriott room was booked under the name Nurdin Azis, which is similar to aliases Mr. Noordin has used in the past.
The unexploded bomb showed "strong indications" that Mr. Noordin or terrorist cells linked to him were involved in Friday's events, said Ansyaad Mbai, head of counterterrorism at Indonesia's Coordinating Ministry for Political and Security Affairs, in an interview on Saturday. "The bomb in the Marriott was similar to ones we found in Cilacap," he said.
Attempts to identify the two suicide bombers, who were among the nine dead, were continuing, with police believing at least one of them was Indonesian. Both of their bodies were decapitated in the blasts, making it difficult to verify their identities.
Whatever the investigation reveals, the terrorists' success in smuggling bomb parts into the JW Marriott underscores their growing ability to beat tactics employed by security experts in recent years to keep them at bay. Because of past bouts with terrorism in Indonesia, including bombings in Bali in 2002 that killed more than 200 people, major Jakarta hotels have some of the tightest security in the world, with airport-style metal detectors and heavily guarded driveways with roadblocks.
The bombers appeared to have no trouble getting past those security measures, though, smuggling bomb parts into the hotel disguised as laptops, police said. The ability to assemble bombs inside hotels is "definitely a step up in their tactics," said Paul Quaglia, an analyst in Bangkok at PSA Asia, a security consulting company that has done an audit for the Ritz Carlton in Jakarta. "It's definitely something that was well planned."
Fears were also rising that the bombers were targeting elite businessmen specifically. Noke Kiroyan, an Indonesian citizen and former local chairman of mining company Rio Tinto PLC, was one of 19 executives breakfasting in a small lounge in the JW Marriott, which a local consulting group hires each Friday for its meetings. Mr. Kiroyan, who lost part of his right ear in the attack, said he believes that the bomber who hit the hotel would have chosen the main restaurant on the other side of the JW Marriott's lobby, where most guests were breakfasting and which was the target of a 2003 attack on the same hotel, if they had wanted to inflict the maximum number of casualties. "I think we were targeted," he said.
Other Western executives in Jakarta repeated concerns over the possible targeting of business elites, which they said may lead foreign businesses to be more cautious about how they operate in Indonesia and possibly recalibrate expansion plans. In recent years, Indonesia has made strides in arresting terrorists, making Westerners feel more secure. ExxonMobil Corp. and other foreign resource companies had recently planned to increase the number of expatriate staff in Indonesia.
Just before the blast, early Friday morning, the hotel's closed-circuit television caught images of the suicide bomber, wearing a backpack on his chest and wheeling a suitcase, turning left in the lobby and walking purposefully toward the lounge.
The bomber was challenged by a hotel security guard as he approached the room but was waved through after saying he was delivering a package to his boss, local media reported. Moments later, while at the entrance of the lounge, which was cordoned off with rope, he detonated his bomb, which police said was packed with nails.
Mr. Kiroyan was sitting at a conference table with his back to the lounge's entrance and was partly shielded by a pillar. The last thing Mr. Kiroyan remembers before the blast is reading a long message from his wife on his mobile phone. "Suddenly there was a loud bang and a blinding flash," he said. "My first thought was that my mobile phone exploded. You hear stories about mobile phones exploding. But then I realized it couldn't be that."
Suddenly, Mr. Kiroyan was lying on the floor in pitch darkness with his clothes soaking wet. What he at first took to be blood turned out to be water from the hotel's emergency sprinkler system. People were crying out that they couldn't see.
Mr. Kiroyan then made his way out of the room, where he was met by two hotel staff and guided outside to wait for an ambulance. "I feel angry but relieved that I am alive," Mr. Kiroyan said.
Although he didn't directly observe the suicide bomber, Mr. Kiroyan said other colleagues at the meeting later recounted that some of the people in the room remember seeing an unknown Indonesian man at the entrance just before the explosion.
The four foreigners who have so far died in the Marriott explosion -- three Australians and a New Zealander -- were all sitting at the far end of table from Kiroyan, nearest the entrance. An Indonesian waiter and the suicide bomber also were killed in the explosion.
Indonesian terrorists have failed in recent years to kill a large number of Westerners in suicide bombings. The 2002 Bali nightclub attacks killed 202 mainly Western tourists through two bombs, one in a car and the other carried in a backpack by a suicide bomber. But an earlier attack on the JW Marriott in Jakarta in 2003, by a car bomb, killed 12 people, two-thirds of them Indonesians, and injured more than a hundred. Attacks against the Australian embassy in 2004 and again in Bali in 2005, killed mainly Indonesians.
Foreign expatriates living in Jakarta said none of the previous attacks so directly targeted foreign business interests. The idea that the meeting Friday may have been a focus was "a scary thought" said William Reed Rising, a U.S. citizen who works in real estate and normally attends the briefing but was absent last week.
—Patrick Barta contributed to this article.Write to Tom Wright at tom.wright@wsj.com
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