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strong>April 19, p22

I worked at a British company in Jakarta right out of college. Once, during a water-cooler chat that somehow turned to Daniel Day-Lewis' Oscar-winning performance in the film, In The Name of the Father, an expat told me that while he was growing up in London, whenever a bomb went off, his Irish mother would pray that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was not behind it.

As the aforementioned movie perfectly showed, back in those confusing years any chaos in the UK could easily be attributed to the IRA, which just made life harder for any Irish folk in the vicinity. (By Lynda Ibrahim, Jakarta)

Your comments:

Why was the Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan not picked up by the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) during his trip to and from Dagestan, despite being firmly on their radar?

Did they allow the bombing to happen to achieve a higher cause? After all, fear and terror is America's biggest weapon to justify increased military spending and future foreign interventions.

Zaki Hammaad

The FBI like the Densus 88 counterterrorism unit (Densus 88) are geared towards terrorist groups and people like this are pretty difficult to pin anything on unless caught in the act or, sadly, afterward.

Whatever the reasoning ' it is up to decent Muslims to try and stem this ever increasing flow of violence.

Duncan

Sorry to inform you that the bombers are Muslims. And yes, stupid people across America use this tragedy to bully Muslim Americans, although some of them are also minorities themselves.

Mario Rustan

I bet you that in many parts of the world, people who have lost their families to American drones are thinking: Now maybe Americans will realize what it is like when an explosion comes out of nowhere and kills.

Sheldon Archer