Fear of terrorism reemerging in SE Asia
Agencies Kuala Lumpur
Even after taking harsh measures against terrorists after the deadly 2002 Bali blasts, recent bomb attacks indicate that terrorism has not been suppressed in Southeast Asia.
A small explosive device was hurled outside the Australian High Commission building in Malaysia's capital on Tuesday but caused no injuries or damage, officials said.
It was the first such incident involving a foreign embassy in mainly Muslim Malaysia and comes a week after Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi scored a landslide win against the Islamist opposition in general elections.
No one claimed responsibility and no arrests were made, police said.
In the Philippines, the police foiled a terrorist strike on Tuesday similar in scale to the Madrid bombings with the arrest of four militants from a group linked to al-Qaeda and the seizure of powerful explosives.
"We have pre-empted a Madrid-level attack on the metropolis by capturing an explosive cache of 36 kilograms," Philippine President Gloria Arroyo told reporters, comparing the plot to the March 11 bombings in the Spanish capital that claimed almost 200 lives.
The explosive cache "was intended to be used for bombing (shopping) malls and trains in Metropolitan Manila," by the four Abu Sayyaf militants, she said.
"The most dangerous terrorist cell of the Abu Sayyaf has been dismantled," said Arroyo, a leading Asian ally of the U.S.-led war on terrorism.
Meanwhile, tourists have fled Thailand's troubled southern provinces after a weekend bomb attack targeted Malaysians, and officials say they fear it may take years to draw visitors back.
Thailand's Muslim-majority south has been plagued by violent unrest since Jan. 4, when masked gunmen raided an arms depot and killed four soldiers, triggering a wave of violence that the government has failed to suppress.
But Saturday's blast which wounded 28 people in Sungai Kolok, a small town on the Malaysian border popular with tourists, was the first aimed at civilians -- and the resulting panic has devastated the tourism industry.
"Within the next two years, a lot of people who work in tourism here will become fishermen," Abdul Aziz Awangseman, chairman of Narathiwat province's Tourist Business Association, told AFP.
"After the events of Jan. 4, tourism decreased here by about 70 percent, but the bomb happened just one kilometer from the Malaysian border, so people in Malaysia are scared, and maybe it's down to 90 percent now."
Though these violent incidents were small in nature, they pose a serious threat to the notion that Southeast Asia has been recovering from terror which brought death and destruction to the region during the last four years
The bomb in Malaysia caused no injuries or damage to property after hitting the front fence of the Australian High Commission in central Kuala Lumpur and exploding, Australian Deputy High Commissioner Simon Merrifield told AFP.
He declined to speculate on whether it was a terrorist incident or the expression of some personal grudge against Australia.
Merrifield described the attack as "a minor incident involving a small improvised explosive device being thrown from a car at ten to five this morning (3:50 a.m. in Jakarta).
Malaysia tightened security around foreign embassies on Tuesday after the incident at the Australian High Commission, officials said.
In a separate development in Manila, the U.S. Embassy charge d'affaires Joseph Mussomeli, praised Arroyo for the arrests, saying that the "the timely response to this threat has likely prevented a major tragedy."