IS says its fighters launched deadly attack in heart of Indonesian capital
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ISLAMIC State-linked suicide attackers struck at the heart of the capital of Muslim-majority Indonesia yesterday, executing a Westerner and blowing up a Starbucks, police said.
Five extremists launched an assault copying “the pattern of the Paris attacks” as they detonated explosives and shot at people in a district packed with malls, embassies and United Nations offices.
The assault also left an Indonesian man dead, 19 other people injured, and a police post destroyed, in what the country’s president dubbed “acts of terror.”
Late last night, Islamic State officially claimed responsibility for a gun and bomb assault in the center of the city in which seven people died, five of them IS attackers.
“A group of soldiers of the caliphate in Indonesia targeted a gathering from the crusader alliance that fights the Islamic State in Jakarta through planting several explosive devices that went off as four of the soldiers attacked with light weapons and explosive belts,” the group said in a statement.
It said there were 15 people killed but the official tally according to the Indonesian government is seven.
Earlier, national police spokesman Anton Charliyan had said: “There is a strong suspicion that this is an ISIS-linked group in Indonesia. From what we see today, this group is following the pattern of the Paris attacks.”
IS gunmen killed 130 people in a series of coordinated attacks on the French capital in November.
Charliyan said the five-strong cell who struck yesterday included three suicide bombers who initially targeted a Starbucks opposite a major shopping mall.
After the first explosion, two men armed with pistols took two men hostage. He identified them as an Algerian and a Dutch national, however Jakarta police chief Tito Karnavian said the second man was Canadian.
Charliyan said the Algerian managed to escape with bullet wounds, but the second man was shot dead on the spot and an Indonesian man who had tried to help the hostages was also shot and killed.
“Soon afterwards, two men riding motorbikes ran into a police post and blew themselves up,” he said, adding that four officers had been left in a critical condition.
Witnesses said the gunman who emerged from Starbucks began firing at bystanders, reloading his weapon as security forces moved in behind the cover of moving vehicles.
“I heard a loud bang, boom. It felt like an earthquake. We all went downstairs,” said Ruli Koestaman, 32, who had been in a nearby building when the attack started mid-morning.
“We then saw that the Starbucks downstairs was destroyed too. I saw a foreigner — Westerner, a man — with a mangled hand but alive.
“A Starbucks waiter then ran out with blood coming out of his ear. And I asked anyone hurt inside, he said yes, one. Dead already. Then everybody gathered and a terrorist appeared. He had a gun and started shooting at us and then at Starbucks. Then the police post exploded.”
Police said there were four blasts, although eyewitnesses reported at least six.
Graphic photographs from the scene showed the bloodied bodies of what appeared to be two men in civilian clothes lying by the side of a road next to the wrecked police post.
Another body, also apparently male, was pictured lying on his back in the center of the street while another, almost naked, lay nearby.
Starbucks said it was shutting all its branches in the Indonesian capital in response to the attack.
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