Indonesian police have denied they received a mobile phone text message before yesterday's embassy bombing warning foreign missions in Jakarta would be attacked unless the alleged head of the Jemaah Islamiyah terror group was freed.
At least nine people were killed in the bombing yesterday, and the explosion, which wounded 182 people, most of them office workers, left a large crater outside the Australian embassy.
The blast tore off the glass fronts of surrounding office towers and left the remains of motorcycles, cars and a truck strewn around the main road outside the embassy compound.
Police suspect the al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiah militant network carried out the attack, and the group appeared to admit responsibility in an Internet statement that could not immediately be authenticated. The statement warned of more attacks unless Australia withdrew forces from Iraq.
Australian prime minister Mr John Howard repeated an allegation made by his foreign minister, Mr Alexander Downer, at a press conference in Canberra that the threat was not passed on to Australian Federal Police until hours after yesterday's bombing. Indonesian police said they received no such warning.
"That's not true. Where did Downer get that from?" said police spokesman Maj Gen Paiman.
Earlier Mr Downer had told reporters in Jakarta that "Indonesian police received an SMS half an hour before the attack to the effect that Western embassies would be attacked unless Abu Bakar Bashir was released". He did not elaborate.
Bashir is in jail awaiting trial on charges that he heads Jemaah Islamiyah. Australia and the United States have both publicly accused Bashir of terrorism, and urged Indonesia to prosecute him. Bashir denies any wrongdoing.
Police believe a suicide bomber in a Daihatsu minivan packed with explosives was responsible for the attack. "According to witnesses, the bomb was in a car that we have identified as a green Daihatsu Zebra. It exploded right away so we have assumed the perpetrator was still in the car," a police spokesman said.
The bombing came days before Indonesia's presidential election, two days before the third anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the United States and a month before Australia's general election.
Jemaah Islamiah is seen as al-Qaeda's Southeast Asian arm and is accused of carrying out the Bali attack and a suicide car bombing outside the Marriott hotel in Jakarta in August 2003 in which 12 people died.
Police have suggested a link to Azahari Husin, a Malaysian bomb-making expert and Jemaah Islamiah member believed to have made the bombs used in the Marriott and Bali blasts.
Hours after yesterday's attack, al-Qaeda's number two Ayman al-Zawahri appeared in a videotape aired on Al Jazeera television predicting defeat for US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.