The sermon had only just begun. It was Friday prayers, a little after noon, and the mosque inside a state high school in Jakarta’s Kelapa Gading district was full of students. Then came two blasts, one inside the building and one outside, and gray smoke filled the room.
“Our hearts were beating fast, we couldn’t breathe,” a school cook told Reuters. She remembered white smoke pouring from the mosque and the windows blown out after what she called a “massive” explosion.
Videos shared that afternoon showed dozens of pupils in uniform running across the basketball court, some pressing their hands over their ears. By the end of the day the toll was more than 50 injured, most of them students. Police chief Asep Edi Suheri said many of the wounds came from glass shards and burns, and that the blasts appeared to originate near the mosque’s loudspeaker. Twenty students were still in hospital with burns, three of them seriously hurt. Parents told local television that their children had been struck on the head, hands and feet by sharp nails and fragments.
A 17-year-old suspect
Authorities named a 17-year-old male student at the school as the suspect. Deputy House Speaker Sufmi Dasco Ahmad said he was undergoing surgery, and national police chief Listyo Sigit Prabowo confirmed he was one of two students being operated on for serious injuries. No one had died.
The question everyone asked was why. A pupil told the state news agency Antara that the suspect was a student who had been bullied and “wanted revenge.” Other pupils described a loner who often drew violent pictures and who was found lying on the ground after the blasts.
What police found, and what they would not say
Photos from the scene showed a submachine gun-style object with writing on the barrel: “14 words. For Agartha.” On its body was another line, “Brenton Tarrant. Welcome to Hell.” Tarrant carried out the 2019 mosque attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 51 people. The “14 words” is generally a reference to a white supremacist slogan.
The police chief later said the weapon was a toy gun with those markings, and that investigators wanted to know how the suspect built the device and carried out the attack. A minister, Lodewijk Freidrich Paulus, said the same, and warned against leaping to conclusions. “Don’t jump to the conclusion that this is a terrorist act,” he said. Asep asked the public to hold off on speculation too: “Let the authorities work first.”
Indonesia remembers 2002, when al-Qaida bombings on the resort island of Bali killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists. Since 2023 authorities have talked about a “zero attack phenomenon.” The blasts at the school came only weeks after a building at an Islamic boarding school collapsed and killed at least 60 people.
Sources
- More than 50 people injured in blast at mosque in Jakarta school complex (BBC)
- Multiple explosions shake a mosque in an Indonesian high school, injuring dozens (AP, via NPR)
- Indonesia: Explosions at Jakarta school injure dozens (DW)
