Police said five suspects and two civilians were killed, while 10 other people were injured, after a series of explosions and gunfire tore through a Starbucks cafe in Jakarta and shook an embassy district.
Advertisement
Tri Seranto, a bank security guard, said he saw at least five attackers, including three suicide bombers who detonated their explosives in Starbucks.
A spokeswoman from Global Affairs Canada says the government is working with Indonesian authorities to confirm the identity of the victim in Jakarta.
An Indonesian news agency with links to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) said later Thursday that the group had claimed responsibility for the attack.
Police earlier had said four attackers and three civilians had died, though confused and conflicting death tolls are common in the immediate aftermath of a terror attack.
Police have also been less than clear about the explosions, at one point calling them grenade blasts, before saying they were suicide bombings.
But police believe that they were linked to ISIS, and the Islamic State-affiliated Aamaq News Agency reported people from that terror group were behind the bloodshed.
At least seven people were killed, police said, in an attack on a country that Islamic State had threatened to put in its “spotlight”.
“The situation is under control”, the Indonesian National Police said in a statement.
Jakarta police spokesman Colonel Muhammad Iqbal said seventeen people including five attackers were killed in the Thursday terrorist attacks.
It was the first major attack in Jakarta since the 2009 simultaneous attacks on the J.W. Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels, which left seven people dead.
Indonesia suffered its deadliest attack in 2002, when 202 people were killed in three bomb attacks in the tourist hotspot Bali.
Thursday’s attack prompted a security lockdown in central Jakarta and enhanced checks all over the crowded city of 10 million.
“I was riding a motorbike when suddenly the explosion went off at the police post”, eyewitness Eliaz Warre told The Associated Press.
The ABC’s South-East Asia correspondent Samantha Hawley said armoured trucks, the head of intelligence and bomb squad officers have joined police at the scene of the blasts. However, the emergence of the Islamic State group has raised concern that Indonesians returning from Middle East battlefields could stage attacks on home soil. And I asked anyone hurt inside, he said yes, one.
Roads leading into the area have been closed and police say that up to 14 militants were responsible.
1057 – A second explosion was heard in central Jakarta, Reuters eyewitnesses said.
Speaking in the wake of Thursday’s attack, Clarke Jones, a counterterrorism expert at the Australian National University, said that such an incident is not a great surprise.
The government had deployed 150,000 security personnel to safeguard churches, airports and other public places across the predominantly Muslim nation, and made a series of pre-emptive arrests.
“For now the gunfire has stopped but they are still on the run, we are afraid there will be more gunshots”.
Advertisement
“We know that ISIS has the desire to declare a province in this region”, said Kumar Ramakrishna, a counter-terrorism analyst at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
