Quotes of the Day

Eri Suheri can be seen most mornings in the same spot in front of the Metropolitan Medical Center, an upscale hospital located in the heart of Jakarta's Kuningan business district. A skinny twentysomething with a toothy smile, Eri stands next to his motorbike, hoping one of the stream of patients, relatives and medical staff emerging from the hospital will dole out 10,000 rupiah—about a dollar—for the privilege of being ferried through the city's notoriously snarled traffic on the back of his bike. Last Thursday, Eri slurped down a late morning bowl of breakfast noodles at a street-food stall situated between the hospital and the adjacent Australian embassy. At 10:15 a.m., as he turned to walk back to his usual spot, Eri was briefly blinded by a searingly bright flash, then hit by a thunderous blow to his back. "The ground underneath me shook, and I was thrown off my feet, landing a few meters away," Eri recalls. "I looked behind me, and the whole place had turned to ruins. Pieces of glass were flying in the air; I saw many people running, holding their wounded heads, blood streaming through their hands."

Though his ears hurt and he couldn't hear much, Eri helped ferry the wounded to the nearby hospital. "I saw a policeman lying helpless on the road, one of his legs missing, while I was carrying a woman, her head covered with blood. She was screaming all the way that her eyes hurt." After almost an hour, Eri finally sat down on a curb to rest. "My legs were shaking from exhaustion," he says. Looking around for the first time since the explosion, he saw that the ground was still littered with human-body parts and pools of blood. A severed leg lay partly covered in newspaper between two charred tree trunks on the road divider. "It was horrible," he says, still trembling several hours later. "Horrible."

For many Indonesians, last week's bomb blast, and its accompanying images of bloody corpses and twisted, charred metal, were grimly familiar. The explosion was the third major terrorist attack to rock the country in less than two years: in October 2002 bombs on the resort island of Bali killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, the single largest group; and 12 died in an attack a little more than a year ago on Jakarta's JW Marriott hotel. This time, the death toll was nine Indonesians, killed by what police say was a car bomb detonated by two suicide bombers on the curbside near the high metal gates of the Australian embassy. Some 182 others were wounded, many of them office workers sprayed with flying glass from the hundreds of windows that were shattered in buildings that line Jalan H.R. Rasuna Said, a six-lane thoroughfare that serves as one of central Jakarta's main traffic arteries. Although no Australians were killed (an Indonesian gardener and a guard at the embassy died), Canberra viewed the blast as an attack on Australia. Prime Minister John Howard, a staunch ally of U.S. President George W. Bush in the war on terrorism, dispatched Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty, who played a big part in the Bali investigation, to Jakarta. Howard vowed that Australia would not "be intimidated by acts of terror" and pledged to upgrade security at overseas missions and domestic airports.

Like the previous bombings, say authorities, last week's blast bore the hallmarks of Jemaah Islamiah (J.I.), a regional network of militants bent on establishing a pan-Islamic state across Southeast Asia. Indeed, a day after the bombing, Howard told reporters that Indonesian police received a text message 45 minutes before the blast warning that Western embassies would be attacked unless Islamic cleric Abubakar Ba'asyir—whom Indonesian authorities believe is J.I.'s spiritual leader and whom they are holding under antiterrorism laws—was released; the police say they did not receive any such message. (Abubakar has consistently denied involvement in terrorist activities and is suing TIME for a 2002 article that accused him of links to terrorism.) Looking ahead, added Howard, intelligence garnered by both the Indonesians and Australians indicates that "the number of [J.I.] operatives is sufficiently large to support the fear there could be another attack."

Still, as the familiar black-suited police forensic officers began to scour the bomb scene for evidence, Jakarta soon returned to some semblance of normalcy. Although international schools and some embassies and consulates remained closed in the days after the attack, there was no talk of mass evacuation among the city's expatriate population, as there was after Bali. The main Jakarta Stock Exchange index plunged about 4% in the hours after the blast but recovered to close less than 1% lower by the end of the day before finishing the week at a four-month high. The story was much the same for the rupiah, which initially weakened against the dollar but recovered by the end of the week. "People are getting used to the idea that this sort of thing is going to happen," says Hans Vriens, head of the Jakarta office of the political-consulting group APCO. "They know that the police are doing a pretty good job of tracking [the culprits] down. It's becoming like living in London when the I.R.A. was bombing there, or in Spain with the eta attacks." Arthur Woo, an economist at HSBC Global Markets in Hong Kong, adds that the latest bombing is unlikely to have a significant effect on Indonesia's economic growth, observing that "financial markets have become more desensitized [to terrorist attacks]." Even in the notoriously vulnerable tourism trade, Indonesia's biggest foreign-exchange earner after oil, experts see relatively minor fallout. Alistair Speirs, chairman of the Indonesian chapter of the Pacific Asia Travel Association in Jakarta, expects only a 5-10% drop in tourist arrivals in coming weeks. "I would see business travel back in Indonesia in a month," he says.

The biggest impact may be political. President Megawati Sukarnoputri faces challenger Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a retired General who was her chief Security Minister until a falling out in April, in a presidential election runoff on Sept. 20. Although both candidates have similar stated positions on terrorism and the need to contain Islamic extremism, Yudhoyono has been far more outspoken on the issue, and many might expect him to have more success in preventing future attacks. "This could help [Yudhoyono], because it will reinforce feelings in the public that Indonesia needs a firmer leader than Megawati," says political columnist Bara Hasibuan. "His military background may look more appealing now." Both candidates were evidently well aware of the effect the bombing might have on the election: Yudhoyono toured the bomb site within hours of the explosion, and Megawati appeared a few hours later, after hastily flying back from a royal wedding in Brunei.

In Australia, too, the bombing was having an impact ahead of the country's Oct. 9 general elections. The Australian newspaper described how the opposition Labor Party's leaders huddled with their advisers the day after the blast to discuss how best to cope with the very "headlines it had been dreading"—an act of terrorism on the nation's doorstep that might incline voters toward the hard-line policies of incumbent Howard.

But as the forensic investigation gradually revealed more details of the scope and planning of the attack, it remained unclear whether the bombers aimed to influence voters in either Australia or Indonesia—or whether they were simply reminding the world of their existence. Police said the bombers packed roughly 200 kilograms of potassium chlorate into a Daihatsu pickup truck that was tracked by security cameras as it drove along Jalan H.R. Rasuna Said, made a U-turn and approached the heavily fortified embassy, parking about eight meters from the main gates. The subsequent explosion left a crater some three meters wide and 47 centimeters deep and obliterated a 10-meter section of the fence ringing the squat, five-story embassy, which was designed in the 1990s precisely to survive such an attack. The height and shape of the building, the extra walls and the windows reinforced with a special film to prevent them shattering all helped deflect the blast. "Did the design work in protecting the embassy?" asks a uniformed Australian Federal Police officer at the site. "Draw your own conclusions." He points to the handful of windows in the building that were badly damaged in contrast to the hundreds of glass panes blown out in office buildings along the street, some as many as 400 meters away. The concussion from the blast, says the officer, "basically bounced off the embassy" and "zigzagged up and down the street. That's why you have so many windows broken so far away."

In attacking what the intelligence world calls a "hardened" target, the bombers probably knew they would not cause the deaths of many foreigners but that many Indonesians might be killed or wounded, says Sidney Jones, Asia director of the International Crisis Group (ICG) and an expert on J.I. "They knew there would be Indonesian victims, but they didn't care. They only cared about the symbolic value of being able to say, we're still here, we can still do this even with a huge manhunt going on for our two most wanted bombmakers." Those two bombmakers are allegedly Azahari bin Husin and Noordin Mohammed Top, Malaysians whom Indonesian police suspect of masterminding last week's blast. The jailed plotters of the Bali bombings have also told police that the two were instrumental in planning and executing that attack.

Although Indonesian authorities want Azahari and Noordin for complicity in the Marriott blast, only recently has the critical nature of their alleged roles been revealed by evidence given during police interrogations of other suspected terrorists. According to transcripts of the interrogations of those held for the Marriott attack, which have been translated by ICG and seen by TIME, Noordin was chief strategist of the Marriott attack while Azahari played the role of operational commander, recruiting the suicide bomber and training other participants in bomb construction. A chilling insight into Azahari's cool shepherding of less seasoned accomplices during the operation is given by one of his chief accomplices, a former auto mechanic now under arrest for his own suspected role in the Marriott bombing. According to the transcripts, Azahari's accomplice told his interrogators that he and Azahari filled a minivan with explosives with the help of Asmar Latin Sani, the 28-year-old who was to detonate the bomb. Azahari himself drove the Toyota to a nearby mosque on the day of the bombing, his accomplice told police. After a brief final prayer, Asmar changed places with Azahari, who climbed onto the back of a motorcycle driven by the accomplice. "The motorcycle went first, followed by Asmar driving the truck," the accomplice told police. "About 200 meters before the hotel, Asmar pulled out in front and proceeded toward the lobby, while Azahari and I turned around and headed toward the Carrefour supermarket. Shortly afterward, we heard a big explosion, and I said, 'Allahuakbar'"—God is great.

For now, the police are focused on capturing Azahari and Noordin, intensifying a nationwide manhunt that they say has seen the two men slip away from arrest with minutes to spare no fewer than four times. The continued threat the pair pose was underlined by Suyitno Landung, head of Indonesia's criminal-investigation department, who told reporters that Azahari had recruited suicide bombers after the Marriott bombing. Six were arrested, and they confessed to police that three others were still at large; two of them, said Landung, might have been last week's bombers.

With more than 200 of its members arrested since the Bali blasts, its access to money disrupted and many of its alleged leaders in jail, J.I. may be badly wounded. But it is still alive. "There are still a number of J.I. leaders out there who have the international contacts, charisma and tactical skills to organize this sort of attack," says Jones. Perhaps the most effective weapon against the terrorists may eventually prove to be public opinion. Although the Bali bombings met with a muted response in Indonesia, the widely televised death and suffering caused by the attacks on the Marriott and the Australian embassy have enraged ordinary people. "No Muslim person should ever call himself a Muslim if he is capable of doing something like this," says the motorbike taxi driver Eri. "Enough is enough. These people must be stopped."

• Simon Elegant
• A suicide bombing in Jakarta shows how vulnerable Indonesia remains to terrorism