AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, Tuesday September 10, 2002 4:58 PM
US ambassador links embassy shutdown to al-Qaeda
Al-Qaeda is linked to a terrorist threat that forced the shutdown of US diplomatic
missions in Indonesia, the US ambassador said.
But Indonesian police and the country's top security minister said Tuesday they were
unaware of any threat and said they were not consulted about the US decision.
"While al-Qaeda is on the run, we know that the al-Qaeda network is still far from
defeated," US ambassador Ralph Boyce said to journalists at the Jakarta Foreign
Correspondents' Club.
"We received another graphic example of that in just the past few hours, with the
news about the credible information about a specific terrorist threat against our
embassy in Jakarta and the consulate general in Surabaya," he added.
Boyce refused to elaborate on the threat and cautioned that the nature of al-Qaeda
itself remains unclear.
"I would just caution against being too quick to jump to any conclusions about the
degree of clarity and precision that we ourselves are operating under at this point,"
said Boyce.
Both diplomatic missions, and also the American Club in Jakarta, will remain closed
until further notice, he said.
The decision came just ahead of the one-year anniversary of the September 11
terrorist attacks in the United States that Washington blames on Islamic extremist
Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network.
A Wednesday evening commemoration of those attacks organized by the embassy
and the American Chamber of Commerce at the US-owned JW Marriott Hotel has
been cancelled because of the terrorist threat, US officials said.
Indonesia's police chief, Da'i Bachtiar, said that if such threats materialized the police
will accord the necessary protection but he added "our intelligence did not find such
indicators," the Detikcom online news service reported.
"I'm surprised by the US decision to close its embassy in Jakarta," top security
minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said. "We should have been consulted on this
matter so as not to create the impression that we are not protecting other countries'
assets."
However, Boyce said Indonesian police were notified of the threat on Monday as soon
as US officials became aware of it.
"We asked for enhancement of security around the embassy and our official facilities
and we've received it," he said.
Security outside the embassy did not appear to be much heavier than usual Tuesday
morning.
An embassy statement urged US citizens to be extremely cautious.
Boyce said he could understand why there might be scepticism in the absence of
details about the threat.
"But if information is compelling enough for me to make the call to close the embassy
I'll do it and I did it," he said, describing the threat as "more than an anonymous
e-mail or a phoned-in bomb threat."
Copyright © 2002 AFP. All rights reserved.
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