On October 1, 2005, suicide bombers strike three restaurants in two tourist areas on the Indonesian island of Bali, a popular resort area. The bombings killed 22 people, including the bombers, and injured more than 50 others. This was the second suicide-bombing incident to rock the island in less than three years. (In 2002, a series of three bombs killed 202 people, many of them foreign nationals in Bali on vacation, including 88 Australians.)
The blasts occurred nearly simultaneously, hitting two outdoor restaurants in the Jimbaran beach resort and a third in Kuta, a tourist center about 19 miles away. The attacks, like those in 2002, were thought to be the work of Jemaah Islamiah (JI), an extremist Islamist militant group with links to al-Qaida. JI is also believed to be responsible for the bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta in 2003 that resulted in the deaths of 12 people and of the Australian embassy in Indonesia in 2004, in which 10 people died.
Though Indonesia is the most populous Muslim nation in the world, the island of Bali is mainly Hindu.
