Donald Greenlees, Dili – Before President Jose Ramos-Horta was shot outside his home on Monday, the Nobel Peace laureate was not overly concerned about his personal security in a country with a history of sudden and unpredictable eruptions of violence.

He was in the habit of taking dawn walks for his health along the shoreline near his home in the east of this seaside capital. On the morning he was shot, he left his home accompanied by a solitary guard, who was armed with nothing more than a pistol.

Last December, in a sign of his confidence in the capability of local security forces and in his personal safety, Ramos-Horta had requested that foreign police officers and soldiers assigned to the United Nations and international stabilization force no longer participate in his security detail, senior UN officials said Wednesday.

Thereafter, his security was shared by two groups. Within the compound of his home, soldiers of the East Timor Defense Force stood guard. Whenever he left home, he was accompanied by a squad from the East Timor National Police.

Ramos-Horta's apparent belief that he was not a likely target of violence might nearly have cost his life.

Doctors said he had been lucky to survive the three gunshot wounds he received when he was attacked by a group of men led by a renegade former military police officer, Alfredo Reinado. Ramos-Horta, 58, remained in serious condition Wednesday in a hospital in the northern Australian city of Darwin, doctors said.

The UN and East Timorese police have begun a joint investigation of the shooting, and the ambush an hour later of a motorcade in which Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao was traveling. On Wednesday, they sought arrest warrants from prosecutors for four people after interviewing 11 witnesses to the attack on Ramos-Horta.

Reinado and one of his men were shot and killed in an exchange of gunfire with security guards at the scene.

But the United Nations, which has a security mandate for East Timor, as well as the international military force and the East Timorese government are facing questions about how the country's two top leaders were exposed to attack, why a renowned rebel leader and his gang were left largely free to roam the countryside for months and what had motivated Monday's shootings.

The commander of East Timor's defense force posed some of these questions on Tuesday when he called for the appointment of a panel of inquiry.

But analysts said Wednesday that the problems might lie as much with the political strategy the government was pursing against the military rebels as with the adequacy of security measures.

Reinado had won status as a folk hero in some quarters in East Timor, particularly among unemployed youth. He had deserted in 2006 during a confrontation between sections of the army and the former government over alleged discrimination against soldiers from the country's western districts.

Mari Alkatiri, the former prime minister, tried to resolve the dispute by dismissing several hundred troops. Violence erupted in which 37 people were killed and tens of thousands displaced from their homes. Reinado was captured and jailed, but he later escaped.

The 2006 violence helped bring down Alkatiri's government. But the fear of it being repeated has influenced attitudes to security ever since.

Ramos-Horta and Gusmao led attempts for a peaceful resolution of the dispute with Reinado's men. Last year they asked the UN and international military force, largely made up of Australian soldiers, to abandon the hunt for Reinado in the hope that he might surrender of his own accord.

Ramos-Horta was probably the closest thing Reinado had to a friend in the government. The president had gone so far as to issue a letter of free passage to the army mutineer, allowing him to wander the countryside and unite his supporters.

The chief of the UN mission in East Timor, Atul Khare, said in an interview Wednesday that the government's reluctance to capture Reinado by force had resulted in a hiatus in security operations against his small rebel group, numbering about two dozen former soldiers.

Khare said the UN police, who had the authority to arrest Reinado, did not have the capability to confront a heavily armed opponent in the densely forested and mountainous interior of East Timor.

"We have a police force which is there to maintain law and order, not to go after heavily armed militarized rebels," Khare said. "We don't have a military component in the UN. Therefore, it was very clear that going after these people was much beyond the capacities which were provided to us."

The Australian-led international military force, which comprises about 1,000 troops, is not under UN authority. The international stabilization force halted operations against the rebels following a failed night raid last March. That action had led to rioting in Dili by Reinado's sympathizers and prompted the government to ask the international force to end armed pursuit for fear of provoking wider unrest.

Some UN officials say the efforts Ramos-Horta was leading to reach a negotiated settlement make Monday's shootings puzzling. Officials say it was reasonable for Ramos-Horta to feel sanguine about his personal security.

There is growing speculation that the shooting might have been a kidnapping attempt that went horribly wrong rather than a planned assassination or coup plot, as Gusmao initially described it.

"The evidence isn't leading to assassination plots," said one senior UN official, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak on behalf of the mission. "All the evidence points to a double kidnapping."

The view is partly based on Gusmao's own assessment of the attack. He has highlighted the fact that no one in his convoy was killed in the ambush near his home and that most of the firing was at the wheels of the vehicles. Khare said it was too early to draw conclusions.

Regardless, analysts say negotiating with Reinado was difficult. Alan Dupont, a professor of international studies at the University of Sydney, who has advised the East Timorese government, said Ramos-Horta had been worried about turning Reinado into a martyr.

"I think that his thinking was absolutely right," Dupont said. "I think the fact that Reinado wasn't able to reconcile himself was really a reflection of a flaw in Reinado's character. Most people who knew him recognized that the guy was extremely difficult to talk rationally to."

Still, the death of Reinado in the gunfight at Ramos-Horta's home does not leave East Timor in a more secure state, analysts said. On Wednesday, Parliament approved Gusmao's request to extend the 48-hour state of emergency for another 10 days, under which an 8 p.m. curfew is imposed, unauthorized public gatherings are banned and the police are granted special additional powers.

Australia bolstered its 780-strong military deployment with an additional 140 troops and 70 police officers. East Timor's near neighbors, Australia and Indonesia, have justifiable concerns about the stability of the six-year-old nation. Civil war in East Timor following Portugal's abrupt de-colonization in 1975 caused a flood of refugees across the border into Indonesia and gave Indonesia the pretext to begin an invasion and a brutal 24-year occupation.

Hugh White, a former deputy secretary of the Australian Defense Department and professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University, said the international military commitment increasingly looks like it has no exit strategy.

"I don't think additional troops will make much difference," he said. "In the end these are not problems that the military can solve, the problems have to be solved by political negotiation, or reconfiguration of East Timor's political structures to reflect the social realities. That process seems to be happening very slowly if at all."

[Tim Johnson in Sydney contributed reporting.]