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We stared at the scene in disbelief, hugged each other and hurried back to my hotel room. Along the sidewalk on the left I saw Jeanne approaching. The situation was not under control, not yet. Policemen and soldiers drove the crowds back. His feet pointed at the sky in an unnatural way. A man on his back, killed just minutes ago. Four hundred meters further, at the intersection of my street and Jalan Thamrin, the major arterial in the center of Jakarta, we saw a body lying in the street. Hundreds of arms holding up smartphones to film what had happened. Hundreds and hundreds of people where cars usually crept along, honking their horns. “There’s been an attack! I had to run away from the shooting, and now I’m hiding in that mall around the corner from you!” We planned to spend the whole day visiting some nursing homes in the remoter neighborhoods, looking for eyewitnesses she would once again be acting as my interpreter. Jakarta was her chosen base of operations, and she was her way to my hotel.
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She was a young French freelance journalist, and one of the most relaxed travelers I’d ever met. Six months ago, we met at a language course in Yogyakarta. With its ten million inhabitants, Jakarta is a vast megalopolis, covering almost seven hundred square kilometers if you count the surrounding satellite towns, it brings you to a whopping 30 million people.įive minutes later, the phone rings. Had a truck exploded? A gas tank? From my window I saw no plume of smoke, but then my no-frills hotel only looked out on a little corner of the city. It was like a huge thunderclap, and close by, but the morning sky was a steely blue, just like the day before and the day before that. I was in my hotel room on Jalan Wahid Hasyim, working. I’d never heard an explosion like it before.