JP/14/M01

JP/14/M01

Lawrence Bartlett, Agence France-Presse, Kuala Lumpur

While western tourists, expatriates and diplomats are the focus of fears over new terrorist attacks in Asia, analysts warn that shipping in the vital Malacca Straits could be a prime target.

A bombing on the scale of that in Bali on Oct. 12 which killed nearly 200 people, mainly westerners, could be difficult to repeat partly because of heightened awareness and warnings issued by western countries, they say.

But the Malacca Strait, one of the world's most important sea passages, linking the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea and the Pacific, is a "target rich environment", says Ross Babbage, strategy and defense expert at Australian National University.

The strait, which is about 500 miles (800 kilometers) long and is pinched to just a few miles (kilometers) wide at some points, funnels some 50,000 ships a year between Indonesia's troubled Sumatra Island and the Malay peninsula, past the key port of Singapore.

It has for centuries been a hunting ground for pirates, and it now carries modern treasures for terrorists wanting to hurt the world economy -- such as more than 10 billion barrels per day of oil to Japan, South Korea, China and other Pacific Rim countries.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration says it is considered to be the "key choke point in Asia".

"If the strait were closed, nearly half of the world's fleet would be required to sail further, generating a substantial increase in the requirement for vessel capacity.

"Closure of the Strait of Malacca would immediately raise freight rates worldwide."

The oil supertankers and huge container ships trundling through the strait daily are sitting ducks for the sort of deadly seaborne attacks carried out against the USS Cole in Yemen, two years to the day before the Bali blast, and against the Limburg oil tanker off Yemen on Oct. 6.

The Cole, and apparently the Limburg, were each targeted by a small boat laden with explosives -- the type of assault that could be launched from hundreds of hide-aways on coasts lining the strait.

"If there was to be a successful attack in the Malacca Strait it would potentially have broader strategic consequences which terrorist groups might like to achieve," Babbage told AFP.

"It's one thing to blow up a tanker off the Yemen coast where it doesn't really matter that much because its a long way from anywhere, but if someone blew up something in the Strait of Malacca it could be pretty horrendous."

Andrew Tan, a security analyst with Singapore's Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies, agreed that the threat was real, but said anti-piracy patrols and cooperation between the navies and maritime police forces of Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia "is actually quite good".

However, pirate raids still occur in the Strait, and if a terrorist attack took the form of launching a small boat packed with explosives at an oil tanker "there's not much you can do about it," he said.

"The key to combating terrorism is really to deal with the networks that exist before these attacks are carried out. Malaysia and Singapore have made arrests (of members of Jemaah Islamiyah), the problem is Indonesia."

Jemaah Islamiyah, a suspect in the Bali blast, is believed to be linked to the al-Qaeda terror network of Osama bin Laden.

Clive Williams, director of terrorism studies at Australian National University, said he was also concerned about the possibility of a ship being hijacked in the strait and driven into another vessel, such as a U.S. warship.

"It would be relatively easy to hijack a ship. Nowadays there are sometimes very small crews and some very big ships only have eight people on board."

The International Maritime Bureau (IMB) last week proposed two radical initiatives in a bid to beat piracy, hijacking and terrorist attacks: electric fences for ships and specially protected channels for oil tankers.

The London-based organization, which has its Piracy Reporting Center in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur, said the number of attacks on ships reported worldwide in the first nine months of this year was 271, up from 253 in the same period last year.

Hijackings by organized crime syndicates were also up, from 15 to 20.

Indonesian waters experienced the highest number of piracy attacks overall, with 72 incidents reported.