Monday, May. 02, 2011

The Bali Bombings

After 9/11, the next major terror strike took place on the other side of the globe, in the balmy, tourist-clogged Indonesian island of Bali. An October 2002 suicide bomb blast as well as a car bomb at two nightclubs popular with tourists led to over 200 deaths, including 88 Australians. On the archipelago nation's only Hindu-majority island, the attacks were carried out by Jemaah Islamiyah, an al-Qaeda affiliated Islamist group that sought to radicalize the world's most populous Muslim nation. Three years later, more blasts would hit Bali. But the Indonesian government has largely been successful in clamping down on the extremists in its midst — monitoring the more radical madrassahs and rounding up terror suspects, including those responsible for the Bali strikes. Umar Patek, one of the few behind the attacks still evading justice, was seized by Pakistani security forces in Karachi this March.