A car bomb that exploded outside the Australian embassy in Jakarta today killed at least eight people and wounded more than 130 in an attack that Indonesian police blamed on al Qaeda-linked militants.
The blast came days ahead of presidential polls in the world's most populous Muslim nation and exactly a month before Australia's general election. It blew a large hole in the embassy's fence and left a deep crater in the road outside.
Charred debris, bodies and body parts, glass and the twisted wreckage of motorcycles, cars and a truck littered the road outside the embassy after the blast, which tore off the glass fronts of nearby office towers, wounding many office workers.
Australian Prime Minister Mr John Howard expressed outrage. "This is not a nation that is going to be intimidated by acts of terrorism," he told reporters in Melbourne.
His foreign minister, Mr Alexander Downer, who was flying to Jakarta today along with a team of bomb experts, put the death toll at 11 - all of them Indonesians.
Indonesian President Ms Megawati Sukarnoputri pledged to track down those responsible, and broke off a trip to Brunei to fly back to Jakarta. After a visit to the site and to blast victims in a nearby hospital, she called on Indonesians not to panic.
Police said the attack bore the hallmarks of Jemaah Islamiah, an al-Qaeda-linked militant Islamic network blamed for previous blasts in Indonesia such as the Bali bomb attacks in 2002 that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.
They would not say if it was a suicide bomb attack.
"This group is the same as Azahari's group of bombers," police chief General Da'i Bachtiar said.
Azahari is a senior figure inside Jemaah Islamiah, which wants to set up a pan-Islamic state in parts of Southeast Asia.
He is believed to have been the key bombmaker in the Bali blasts and also a suicide bomb attack at Jakarta's J.W. Marriott Hotel in August 2003 that killed 12 people.
Indonesian shares and the rupiah currency tumbled after the blast, then regained much of the lost ground. Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said Australians in Indonesia concerned for their safety should consider leaving.
The blast occurred just two days ahead of the anniversary of the attacks of September 11th, 2001, on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, in which about 3,000 people died.