Spain claims its warning over Indonesian terror cell went unheeded

Spanish police have claimed that their warnings of the existence of a terrorist cell in Indonesia went unheeded.

As speculation grows over whether the bombings could have been avoided, officials in Bali said they were investigating the possibility that the Sari Club was destroyed by two bombs, not one.

Spain has said it warned Indonesia more than a year ago of the existence of an al-Qa'ida training camp on the island of Sulawesi, east of Borneo.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, will today make an emergency Commons statement to dismiss claims that the Foreign Office omitted to pass on an intelligence alert over the threat of an attack on Bali.

Spanish police say they passed on information about an Indonesian radical Muslim leader, Parlindungan Siregar, said to have run the camp and trained hundreds of mujahedin guerrillas. "Parlin" spent the 1990s in Madrid, where he studied aeronautical engineering, then disappeared in 2000.

He is said to lead the radical Lashkar Jihad, an organisation linked to Indonesia's Jamaah Islamiya, whose leader Abu Bakar Bashir is blamed for the Bali bomb attack. Spanish investigators say "Parlin" telephoned on 7 July 2001, from the Indonesian camp to Imad Eddin Barakat, also known as Abu Dahdah, leader of a suspected al-Qa'ida cell in Madrid.

Abu Dahdah and Jose Luis "Yusuf" Galan, another presumed cell member, were detained in Spain last November after the 11 September attacks. They told the investigating judge Baltasar Garzon they had visited Parlin in Indonesia and taken him money, but denied knowledge of training camps.

"We gave the Indonesian authorities a wealth of details," police said. "From the possible location to the terrorist camp to the details of Parlin and the telephone number which he used in his communications with Spain. But they never came back to us."

Judge Garzon is to send a rogatory commission to Indonesia next week to investigate Parlin's whereabouts. Abu Dahdah, a Syrian with Spanish nationality, got to know Parlin in Madrid's mosque. Spanish police had been tapping Abu Dahdah's phone since 1995.

General Edward Aritonang, an Indonesian police spokes-man, said yesterday that two bombs may have been laid outside the Sari Club on 12 October. Until now, investigators had believed that only one was planted there, the second having been at Paddy's Bar across the road.

Sixty witnesses to the blasts that killed more than 180 people are being questioned in Bali as part of an Australian-Indonesian investigation into the bombings. An Australian spokesman said some had provided "very useful leads". Experts were continuing the task of identifying bodies burnt in the blast. They said only two or three bodies were likely to be identified each day.

In the Philippines, a bomb at an open-air Christian shrine in the southern city of Zamboanga killed a Filipino marine corporal and injured 16 other people yesterday. It was the third bomb attack in the country in the past four days and the second in Zamboanga. Abu Sayyaf, a group linked to al-Qa'ida, has been blamed.