Asians increasingly at risk of blasts

"Actually there has been a very significant shift in the terrorist strategy," said Kusnanto Anggoro, researcher at Jakarta's Centre for Strategic and International Studies. "They are focused instead on the civilian targets."

In Asia's latest deadly attack, seven bombs exploded in trains and stations in the Indian financial capital Mumbai Tuesday night, killing at least 183 people and wounding more than 600 others.

"I'd say that there's certainly more focus on civilian targets since 9/11," said Clive Williams, a professor at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

He was referring to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States which killed about 3,000 people and for which Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility in the Mumbai blasts, the latest of many to hit the city over the past 13 years. Police have blamed most of the previous attacks on Muslim underground figures or Kashmiri separatists.

The list of Asian countries where civilians have either been deliberately targeted or killed as bystanders in recent years is long and includes Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, the Philippines, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In Sri Lanka last month, authorities blamed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam for a landmine explosion that ripped through a bus, killing 64 passengers and injuring 39 in one of the country's deadliest attacks on civilians. The Tigers denied involvement.

The world's worst terrorist attack since 9/11 occurred on the Indonesian resort island of Bali in October 2002 when Islamic militants targeting Westerners killed 202 people. Militants killed another 20 civilians in renewed bombings last October in Bali.

"The most favoured tactic of the terrorist group is to bomb," said Rohan Gunaratna, head of terrorism research at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University.

Williams, the Australian terrorism expert, said that before the Al-Qaeda attacks on the United States, international militancy was often related to the Israeli-Palestinian issue with, for example, attacks on synagogues.

Anggoro in Jakarta said "first-generation terrorists" were linked to territorial-based nationalist movements. Like the Palestinian Liberation Organization, they depended on public support and preferred military targets.

The current "third-generation" are different, he said.

"They are basically unable to confront the security apparatus face-to-face" and have turned to easier-to-hit civilian targets, Anggoro said.

"It's becoming more difficult of course for the security apparatus to protect the civilian targets" such as trains, he said.

Williams said that while the attackers' aim is generally to destabilize governments or provoke a change in policy, a variety of local factors are at play.

Abdul Razak Baginda, executive director of the private Malaysian Strategic Research Centre, said attackers fall into three different categories but it is not clear that civilians are increasingly being targeted.

Militants in Kashmir or southern Thailand are focused on specific separatist issues, he said. Both security forces and civilians have been victims there. A second Al-Qaeda-style group are anti-Western and conduct Bali-type attacks, he said, but a third group -- including pirates and the Philippines' Abu Sayyaf group -- are more like ordinary criminals, Baginda said.