Terrorists Checked In as Guests at Ritz-Carlton and JW Marriott in Jakarta

July 17, 2009 at 12:59 PM | by juliana | Comments (0)

Two Marriott hotels were attacked yesterday in Jakarta, Indonesia by suicide bombings that killed eight people and left more than 50 injured. It is now believed that the suicide bombers actually checked into the JW Marriott Jakarta and the Ritz-Carlton Jakarta. A third bomb was later found on the 18th floor of the JW Marriott in one of the guestrooms.

Times Online has details from the blast sites:

Bleeding victims, including foreign businessmen who had been in breakfast meetings, crawled and staggered out of the JW Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels in Jakarta�s Mega Kuningan business district after the explosions struck two minutes apart shortly before 8am.

Footage from a security camera at the Ritz-Carlton showed a suited man wearing a baseball cap, and carrying a backpack and a wheeled suitcase, entering the hotel�s first floor restaurant just before the explosion, which killed two people.

HotelChatter reports that Marriott Hotels has released a statement about the incidents saying the hotels did sustain damages but it "does not appear to be structural" — and that "injured guests and hotel employees were taken to the hospital for treatment" and relocated to different hotels.

Marriott has been keeping everyone posted on the latest news via their Twitter feed. The Ritz-Carlton CEO Simon Cooper seemed to be tweeting the same things as the story developed, as did the Ritz-Carlton PR Twitter.

No terrorist group has publicly claimed responsibility for the attack but the NY Times reports that the Jemaah Islamiyah group with ties to Al Qaeda is strongly suspected. The group performed a similar attack on the same Marriott hotel back in 2003.

This is not the first time a Marriott hotel has been the site of a deadly bomb blast. Last September, a truck bomb exploded at the security entrance to the Marriott Islamabad Hotel, killing 40 people.

The photo above comes via a guest at the Ritz-Carlton, who tweeted his experience as it was happening.

[Photo via BreakingTweets]

Jaunted

Select a Destination:

Tragedies / Marriott Hotels / Hotels / → All Tags