JAKARTA, Aug 5: At least 14 people were killed and 149 others injured after a powerful car bomb blast ripped through a luxury hotel and other nearby buildings here on Tuesday, the Indonesian Red Cross said.
The police, which said that the blast resembled the Bali blast, had earlier said at least 10 persons, including three from Australia, Malaysia and the United States had been killed and 74 others injured in the lunch-time explosion.
However, spokesmen for the US and Australian embassies denied that any of their nationals had been killed in the explosion. Kirk Coningham, of the Australian embassy, said police confirmed to his embassy that no Australians were among the dead.
In the Hague, a spokesman for Rabobank said one of its Dutch employees, Hans Winkelmolen, 49, had died in the blast.
Winkelmolen had handed over his duties as general manager for Rabobank Indonesia to his successor on August 1 and was supposed to return to the Netherlands soon.
His family had left Indonesia for the Netherlands on the previous day, the spokesman said.
The Rabobank website said Winkelmolen’s successor, Canadian Antonio Costa, was also wounded in the attack and taken to hospital.
US embassy spokesman Tim Gerhardson told AFP that two Americans were confirmed injured in what he described as a “deplorable act of violence.”
Gerhardson said one of the injured Americans had been released from hospital but the other was still being treated.
An ambulance crew was seen unloading seven plastic bags containing body parts at the state-run Cipto Mangunkusumo hospital. The crew declined to comment.
“It looks like they were all burned,” said a morgue official, Oyon, after the first bodies arrived.
Body bags identified four of the victims as Slamet Herianto, Johanes, Samsuddin and Harna.
MMC Hospital, one of four which received the dead and wounded from the blast, and the nearest to scene, treated 43 patients but most were quickly discharged, said spokeswoman Anitya Irna.
She said four patients were in the hospital’s burn unit for treatment of burns to about 30 percent of their bodies.
CONDEMNATIONS: The United States on Tuesday condemned the car bombing of a US-run hotel chain in Jakarta, calling it a “terrorist attack.”
“We strongly condemn this terrorist attack,” spokesman Scott McClellan told journalists in Crawford, Texas, where President George W. Bush is on vacation, adding it was a “deplorable terrorist attack on innocent civilians.”
McClellan refused to comment on any possible involvement of the Al Qaeda network but said that the bombing was “a reminder that we are still fighting a war on terrorism.”
“We fully support President Megawati and her administration in their efforts to fight terror and we stand fully prepared in assist in anyway possible to bring those responsible to justice,” the spokesman added.
McClellan maintained: “We are making important progress into dismantling and disrupting terrorist networks but the war continues and we will not stop until we have disrupted, dismantled and defeated these organizations.”
UNITED NATIONS: UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was “horrified” by Tuesday’s Indonesian bomb blast, his spokesman said.
“The Secretary-General is horrified at the explosion today at the ... hotel in Jakarta,” the spokesman said. “He condems in the strongest possible terms this apparent act of terrorism.”—AFP/Reuters
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