Fear of terrorism reemerging in SE Asia

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."