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6-8-2003 Scotsman Blood and panic as blast rocks hotel By Gethin Chamberlain IN THE restaurants and cafes scattered around the smart glass-sided tower of Jakarta's five-star Marriott Hotel, guests were tucking into their lunches. In his hotel room, Simon Leuning, an Australian tourist, had just arrived and was settling in. In the street outside, Stephen Mellor, one of the Indonesian capital's foreign residents, was parking his car. No-one was paying any attention to the Indonesian-made Kijang van driving past the hotel entrance. Without warning, it exploded. The blast ripped through the building and those around it, sending glass tumbling into the street from the hundreds of shattered windows, showering the scores of people below. Black smoke billowed from the lobby; wreckage was strewn all around. In his room, Mr Leuning was picked up by the force of the explosion. "The window blew in; blew me across the room," he said. "I got out of there as fast as I could." On the 27th floor of one of the neighbouring buildings, Sodik - Indonesians tend to use just one name - had been eating when the blast hit: "People were screaming; panicking," he said. "I thought it was an earthquake." Inside the hotel, Asroni, one of the staff, was choking on the smoke. "I heard a big bang and I tried to get out of the building as quickly as possible," he said. "The smoke was getting into my lungs." Outside in the street, Mr Mellor surveyed the chaotic aftermath. "It was panic. Mad panic," he said. "The police and paramedics did what they could, but they seemed overwhelmed. People were almost hijacking cars in desperation and piling the injured in them to take to hospital." In the street, the bodies of drivers caught in the blast lay in their burning vehicles. The glass front of one of the hotel's cafes was shattered: a few shards of glass left hanging in their frames. Inside, half-eaten plates of pasta sat on tables, abandoned. Outside, people milled around in shirt sleeves, looking for their companions or colleagues. Ceiling and wall panels were scattered in the street outside the lobby of the hotel, exposing the bare concrete pillars. Inside the neighbouring Rajawali, home to the embassies of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, shattered glass lay on the floor and one of the inner ceilings had caved in. The bombers had chosen their spot and their timing carefully, detonating the bomb just as workers were pouring out of their offices in the embassy and business district, and heading out for lunch or to answer the call to prayer from the mosques. As the Indonesian Red Cross began to pick through the wreckage, it became clear that at least 14 people were dead, and another 150 or more injured. In the street outside, at least four bodies lay badly burned. Two cars were on fire next to the hotel. On the fifth floor of the Marriott, the Red Cross found a body, but no head. In the hospital, the injured lined up for treatment. The bodies lay in bags, waiting to be identified. In the meantime, they were tagged with a basic description - "white male" was written hastily on the side of one. The hotel had been popular with Western tourists and business people, although many of the dead and injured were believed to be Indonesians. Police said a Dutch banking executive was among the dead, two Americans, two Singaporeans, an Australian and a New Zealander among the wounded. Later Megawati Sukarnoputri, the Indonesian president, toured the area around the Marriott, located in the wealthy suburb of Kuningan, close to a diplomatic area, on a major road through the city's business district. The force of the explosion had blown a hole about two metres deep in the road. Police found body parts near the wreckage of the vehicle, but they could not tell whether they were those of bystanders or the bomber. The national police chief, General Da'i Bachtiar, said his officers had already recovered the chassis number and the vehicle's registration number. They had contacted the Australian federal police to enlist their expertise in solving the case, just as they had done in the Bali bombings. "From the things we found at the crime scene, it looks very much like the bomb in Bali," Gen Bachtiar said. Police and politicians suspected that the bomber died in the explosion. "There is a strong possibility this was a suicide bomber," said the governor of Jakarta, Sutiyoso. The defence minister, Matori Abdul Djalil, called it an act of terrorism.
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................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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