Sydney - Intelligence agencies have warned there is a "distinct possibility" of a new terrorist attack in Jakarta following the car bombing of the Australian embassy, Prime Minister John Howard said Friday.
Howard also revealed that Indonesian police received a message just an hour before Thursday's deadly bombing warning that a Western embassy could be attacked if authorities did not release a jailed Islamic cleric.
He said intelligence gathered since the bombing indicated the bombing was carried out by Jemaah Islamiyah, an Al-Qaeda-linked radical Islamic group, and could be followed by other attacks.
"The intelligence agencies have warned that there is the possibility of another attack of this kind in Jakarta," Howard told reporters in Canberra.
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"The information they have available indicates that the number of operatives is sufficiently large to support the fear that there could be another attack.
"They have no specific hard information in relation to that but the nature of the intelligence gathered and the size of the operatives indicates that that is a distinct possibility," he said.
Howard said Indonesian police had received a message just 45 minutes before the bombing threatening to attack Western embassies unless authorities released Abu Bakar Bashir, the elderly accused of guiding the Jemaah Islamiyah terror network.
"At about 9.30am (Indonesian) police received a message to the effect that if Bashir were not released, Western embassies would be threatened with bombs," he said.
"The explosion occurred about 10.15am (and) I'm informed that news of that message was conveyed to the federal police at about 5.49am in the afternoon," he said.
Howard declined to criticise the Indonesian police's failure to pass on the warning more quickly, saying the embassy bombing occurred too quickly after the message was received for action to have been taken.
Howard also announced a series of heightened security measures inside Australia in view of Thursday's bombing, but he said authorities were not raising the overall terrorist threat level and had no specific information pointing to an attack inside the country.
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