Jakarta terror attacks: United Nations official describes chaos as horrifying militant attack unfolds in Indonesia’s capital
Jeremy Douglas witnessed the violence from his office window
Jeremy Douglas hadn’t seen anything like what he was witnessing from his office window at the United Nations building in central Jakarta: police exchanging gunfire with militants amid a series of blasts at a key intersection of Indonesia’s capital.
“Serious exchange of fire in downtown #Jakarta. Didn't experience this in 3.5 years in #Pakistan,” Douglas, the regional representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, wrote in a series of tweets on Thursday.
“Amazing how some folks are walking and some running. Kind of a denial or something,” he said in another tweet, referring to the pandemonium on the street below that took almost three hours to bring under control.
He had just gotten out of his car to enter the U.N. building with a colleague “when a massive #bomb went off”, he tweeted. “Chaos and we're going into lockdown.”
Indonesia has seen attacks by Islamist militants before, but a coordinated assault by a team of suicide bombers and gunmen is unprecedented and has echoes of the sieges seen in Mumbai seven years ago and in Paris last November.