A biological attack on Indonesia's embassy in Canberra has damaged Australia's standing among Indonesians, Prime Minister John Howard said, but he downplayed the threat it posed to the countries' attempts to rebuild their often fraught ties.
Officials said 46 staff at the embassy were released from isolation late Wednesday, 12 hours after a letter containing a biological agent arrived at the mission addressed to Ambassador Imron Cotan.
The package contained a powder identified as part of the bacillus bacterial family, which ranges from anthrax to relatively harmless germs, but police said it is not believed to be dangerous.
"It looks very unlikely that the substance contains any bacteria of any pathological significance," Canberra's police chief, John Davies, told reporters.
The package also held a note in the Indonesian language Bahasa which Howard said linked the attack to public anger over the jailing by an Indonesian court last week of a 27-year-old Australian woman on drug trafficking charges.
The Australian newspaper said the note was a "race hate message" and an "anti-Indonesian rant" but Howard declined to provide any details of its contents.
The embassy remained closed Thursday while government scientists tried to identify the germ involved, a process officials said could take up to two days.
Bio-terror expert Professor Lindsay Grayson told the ABC the bacteria was unlikely to be dangerous and was probably a commonly available bacillus strain.
Howard said Australia's first "biological attack" was probably a reprisal for the 20-year jail term handed down against Schapelle Corby, a student beautician arrested when she arrived on the resort island of Bali in October with 4.1 kilograms of marijuana stashed in her luggage.
Corby pleaded innocent, insisting the drugs were planted in her bags, and opinion polls show most Australians believe her and think her case had been mishandled by Indonesian courts.
Howard on Thursday declined to be drawn on the specific motives for the attack, saying he did not want to comment on an ongoing police investigation.
"I describe it very deliberately as a reckless criminal act, even if the substance turns out to be completely benign, it's still a criminal act – the disruption it causes, the fear, the disturbance, the damage it does to our relationship with Indonesia, all of those things warrant the description," he said.
But Howard, who in April hosted Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on a landmark visit heralding a new era of warmer bilateral relations, said it was unlikely the incident would torpedo the rapprochement.
"I think it's important that we don't throw up our arms in horror and say the relationship is destroyed," Howard said on commercial radio.
"Things like this happen." Howard compared the embassy incident to the "infinitely worse" bombing by Islamic militants in 2002 of a Bali nightclub strip that killed 202 people, 88 of them Australian tourists.
He said that attack "wasn't an expression of the attitude of the Balinese people. The Balinese people in fact retained the affection of visiting Australians." Howard's government has sought strenuously to improve ties with Jakarta which were battered when Australia supported East Timor's drive for independence from Indonesia in the late 1990s.
The two governments have notably cooperated closely in anti-terrorism efforts following the Bali bombing.
Australia then led international aid efforts for Indonesia after the December 26 earthquake and tsunami disaster that left more than 128,000 Indonesians dead or missing.
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, who spoke with his Indonesian counterpart, Hassan Wirajuda, after the biological attack, said the Indonesians were "pretty upset at the abuse directed at Indonesia over one particular court case."
"I'm worried that the consequence of the enormous amount of abuse that's been directed towards Indonesia from Australia will be reciprocated, even in the Indonesian parliament, but certainly in the broader Indonesian community and in the Indonesian media. I hope that doesn't happen," he said.
Attorney-General Philip Ruddock agreed that the "event does do great damage in the eyes of many Indonesian people to our relationship." "People will draw all sorts of conclusions and it has the potential to do our bilateral relationship all sorts of harm," he told Southern Cross Broadcasting.