POLICE distributed photographs of the severed heads of the suspected Bali suicide bombers across Indonesia yesterday as they continued their search for three accomplices believed to be at large after the weekend’s deadly attacks.

Pictures of the three severed heads were published in many of the country’s newspapers as pamphlets bearing the photographs were printed for circulation in the hope that somebody may recognise the three, all thought to be Indonesian.

Authorities believe that identifying the bombers will lead them to at least three other men thought to have masterminded the bombings and to have prepared the explosives. Simultaneous attacks struck three packed restaurants in the tourist centres of Kuta and Jimbaran on Saturday night.

“There are those who planned it, there were those making the arrangements, those preparing the bombs,” Made Mangku Pastika, the police chief, said. “Those are the ones we must search for.”

At least twenty-two people, including the three bombers, died in the attacks, several fewer than was previously thought. At least four of the dead were foreign tourists but the majority, and the 120 wounded, were local people. Hospital officials said that initial confusion over the death toll resulted from the many bodies left in fragments after the blasts. Forensic scientists said that the deaths and injuries mostly were caused by nails, glass and ball bearings that the suicide bombers had in their explosive vests. The faces of the suspected bombers, all believed to be between the ages of 20 and 25, were, by contrast, almost unscathed.

Authorities released a list of 25 people reported as missing by friends, relatives or hotels, including one Briton, but emphasised that they did not know whether the people had simply left the island before being accounted for. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office reported two British casualties: one woman with serious injuries who was flown to Singapore for treatment and another who sustained minor injuries.

All exit routes from the island were being heavily monitored by police searching for the bombers’ accomplices, who they believe are still in Bali, possibly in safe houses prepared long before the attacks.

Authorities have said that they cannot rule out the possibility of further bomb attacks in the coming days and a Foreign Office statement yesterday warned Britons to “exercise extreme caution at all times because there remains a high threat from terrorism”.

Indonesian police, aided by Australian detectives, were also focusing their investigation on amateur video footage apparently showing one of the suicide bombers wending his way through the Raja restaurant before blowing himself up.

In the footage, shot by a holidaymaker, a slight man of Indonesian appearance wearing jeans and a T-shirt strolls into the restaurant with something, possibly a rucksack, strapped to his back. A loud bang is heard, accompanied by a bright flash of light, and then smoke fills the restaurant as panicking diners rush to escape.

Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks but suspicions are focusing on the regional extremist group Jemaah Islamiya, whose members were convicted of the nightclub attacks in Bali three years ago, which killed more than 200 people.

Two of the group’s most dangerous militants, the British-trained Azahari Husin and his Malaysian compatriot, Noordin Mohammed Top, are the suspected masterminds of the latest attacks. Some experts have warned that the pair may have abandoned Jemaah Islamiya to form a more hardline organisation bent on further and bloodier terror attacks.

The rest of Indonesia, as well as cities and tourist resorts in the neighbouring Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand, were all on high alert for fear of further attacks by the extremist group whose avowed aim is to carve an Islamic state out of Muslim South-East Asia.

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