Fatal blasts hit Jakarta hotels
By informan. Filed in News |Tags: Fatal blasts, hotels, Jakarta
At least nine people including some foreigners have been killed in two bomb blasts at luxury hotels in the Indonesian capital Jakarta, police say.
One explosion hit the Ritz-Carlton, ripping off its facade, and the other the Marriott Hotel. At least 48 people were injured.
A third blast went off almost three hours later in the north of the city – no injuries have yet been reported.
It is not yet known who carried out the bomb attacks.
The BBC’s Karishma Vaswani says security is extremely tight around the hotels.
The blasts occurred at about 0730 local time (0030 GMT).
“I heard two sounds like ‘boom, boom’ coming from the Marriott and the Ritz-Carlton. Then I saw people running out,” security guard Eko Susanto told AFP.
Myra Junor, who witnessed the blasts from a nearby building, told Reuters windows on the lower floors of the Ritz-Carlton had shattered.
Ambulances are on the scene and there is a heavy police presence, says our correspondent.
Finding the victims
The president director of PT Holcim Indonesia, Tim Mackay, was killed in the blast, the company’s marketing director Patrick Walser told Reuters news agency.
Unconfirmed reports say a New Zealander and a South Korean were injured.
Consular staff are trying to track their nationals, and Australia issued a warning against unnecessary travel to Indonesia.
An Australian man told local radio in Australia that his son had been hurt at the Marriott and was being taken to hospital.
The man, who identified himself only as Jim, said his son had telephoned him from Jakarta to say his leg was wounded and he had lost hearing in one ear in an explosion.
“He’s on his way to hospital. He’s OK,” Jim said.
Manchester United football team was due to arrive in Indonesia on Saturday and was booked to stay at the Ritz-Carlton. The blasts may raise doubts about the team’s tour, PA news agency reported.
The two hotels are in Jakarta’s central business district.
The explosions come two weeks after peaceful presidential elections in Indonesia.
Past tensions
The attack comes just weeks after the country’s presidential elections, won by incumbent President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
The country of 240 million people has been praised in recent years for maintaining a pluralist democracy while finding and punishing radical Islamists responsible for a series of bombings five years ago.
Officials say they have no idea what caused the latest explosions.
Church bombings in 2000 killed 19 people.
Bomb attacks on two nightclubs in Bali in October 2002 killed 202 people, most of them Australian.
The Marriott Hotel was the target of a bomb attack in August 2003 in which 13 people were killed. A bomb outside the Australian embassy in Jakarta in 2004 killed nine people.
Since then, a combination of new laws, anti-terror training, international cooperation and reintegration measures have kept Indonesia peaceful, analysts have said.