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© St. Petersburg Times, published October 17, 2002
JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Aides to President Megawati Sukarnoputri on Wednesday worked to complete a decree aimed at enabling aggressive moves against terrorists as pressure for action from abroad continued to mount after Saturday's deadly bombing in Bali, government officials said.
The decree is likely to be issued Friday, officials said. Though details are not final, the decree would increase authorities' power to investigate and arrest anybody who is suspected of involvement with terrorism, a senior security official told the Washington Post.
Officials said the decree will supplant a similar legislative proposal that has run into parliamentary opposition. Megawati can circumvent the legislative process with the decree.
More than 180 people, including at least two Americans, were killed last weekend when a bomb demolished an entertainment district in Bali.
Indonesian police said Wednesday they had determined that the main blast was caused by C-4 plastic explosives inside a minivan. Four people, including a former military officer who knows "a lot about bomb assembly," are being "intensively questioned," National Police spokesman Saleh Saaf said.
The Jakarta Post reported Thursday that the investigation was focusing on seven foreigners who apparently arrived in Indonesia two days before the attack. The paper said the suspects included a Yemeni and a Malaysian.
KARACHI, Pakistan -- Police and government offices were shaken by a series of parcel bombs that exploded within minutes of each other Wednesday in this volatile port city, injuring at least nine people.
Authorities said at least one of the packages had "from Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal," written on it -- a reference to the United Action Front, a coalition of anti-American religious parties that made unprecedented gains in last week's national elections.
Four other bombs were spotted and defused, including two found at a courier service office that read "From the MMA to you, with love and flowers."
Still Sindh province Home Secretary Mukhtar Ahmad Sheikh cautioned it was too early to say the group, whose Urdu-language initials are MMA, was actually behind the attacks.
In Islamabad, one of the religious bloc's leaders, Riaz Durrani, condemned the bombings.
E-mails claiming responsibility on behalf of militant Muslims were received by a major Pakistani daily newspaper and a local news agency.
Saying they were sent by "Asif Ramzi," a well-known Pakistani militant, the e-mails said 35 packages containing about five ounces of explosives each had been mailed from three different post offices.
The e-mails said the bombs were "a warning to those police officers involved in operations against 'Mujahedeen' (holy warriors) at the behest of the Americans."
It threatened guerrilla operations would soon start against "anti-Islam police officers and other infidels." Other Muslims are planning a mass attack on the United States, it said.
The nine wounded were brought to Jinnah Hospital, the most serious of them with his hand blown off.
SAN'A, Yemen -- An explosives-laden boat rammed a French oil tanker off Yemen, the interior minister said Wednesday -- the first official Yemeni acknowledgment the ship was the victim of a terror attack reminiscent of the deadly assault on the USS Cole two years ago.
Interior Minister Rashad al-Eleimi said arrests had been made but did not describe the suspects or how many were detained, or what they were accused of.
Police had found a rented house in which the explosives were prepared, the minister said in a statement carried by the official news agency Saba.
An intelligence official in Washington has said U.S. experts believed the attack was the work of unspecified operatives with links to al-Qaida.