JAKARTA, Indonesia – Indonesian police found traces of the explosives used in the homocide bombing of the Australian Embassy inside a room rented by the two alleged bombmakers, the national police chief said Saturday.
Police also released security camera footage showing the small white delivery truck driving past the heavily fortified mission in Jakarta moments before it exploded, killing nine people and wounding more than 170. Police believe two of the dead were suicide bombers.
All those killed were believed to be Indonesians, some of them embassy guards.
The bombing, which came ahead of elections in both Indonesia and Australia, has been blamed on the Al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah (search) terror group — the same network implicated in the Oct. 12, 2002 Bali blasts (search) and last year's attack on J.W. Marriott Hotel.
Also Saturday, 1,000 members of the radical Islamic group Hizbut Thahrir (search) demonstrated against terrorism in central Jakarta. Last year the group organized protests against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Demonstrators carried banners reading: "Islam rejects terrorism!"
"We are deeply saddened by Thursday blasts. We don't want to be labeled as a group that supports bombings," the group's spokesman, Ismail Yusanto, told reporters.
Police have said two Malaysians — Azahari bin Husin and Noordin Top — constructed the bomb used in Thursday's blast, and recruited the militants who carried out the operation.
Indonesian police chief Gen. Dai Bachtiar said officers had found traces of TNT and sulfur in a rented room used by the pair in west Jakarta, near the city's international airport.
He said the same substances were found at the scene of the bombing.
"We are still facing a terrorist threat, especially from Azahari and Noordin Top," Bachtiar said. "We are hunting them down."
Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty said a second group of suicide bombers may be at large in Jakarta, and that they could be planning another attack.
"Intelligence comes through all the time about threats and possible threats, and there's further intelligence in the last 24 to 48 hours of a second group," Keelty said before returning to Australia late Friday from Jakarta, where he met officials.
The footage released by police Saturday was taken from two security cameras on two buildings opposite the mission. It shows passers-by and security guards milling outside the gate before a huge cloud of white smoke and debris envelops them.
Australia is a key U.S. ally in the war in Iraq and the timing of the bombing — one month before Australia's elections — has led to speculation it may have been an attempt to influence the polls, in which Prime Minister John Howard is running in a tight race on a pro-American, anti-terror platform.
Howard has been criticized for sending 2,000 troops for last year's U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and the country still has more than 850 military personnel there or in the area. The Iraq war is deeply unpopular in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation.
Analysts have predicted the embassy bombing will have little impact on the Indonesia's Sept. 20 elections, which polls show incumbent President Megawati Sukarnoputri likely to loose by a large margin.
But it could decrease the already-waning support for conservative Islamic political parties, which fared poorly in April parliamentary elections.
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