Summary: In this paper, bounded model checking of asynchronous concurrent systems is introduced as a promising application area for answer set programming. To model asynchronous systems, we use a generalisation of communicating automata, 1-safe Petri nets. It is shown how a 1-safe Petri net and a requirement on the behaviour of the net can be translated into a logic program such that the bounded model checking problem for the net can be solved by computing stable models of the corresponding program. The use of the stable model semantics leads to compact encodings of bounded reachability and deadlock detection tasks as well as the more general problem of bounded model checking of linear temporal logic. Correctness proofs of the devised translations are given, and some experimental results using the translation and the Smodels system are presented.