Pools of blood, glass litter street
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Indonesian police are investigating the blast.
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JAKARTA, Indonesia -- The powerful bomb which ripped through Jakarta's Marriott Hotel struck in the middle of the day when diners were sitting down for lunch at the hotel's lobby restaurant.
The blast at about 12:30 p.m. (0530 GMT) appeared to have been timed to cause maximum injuries and was so powerful the restaurant was reduced to a blackened and bombed-out shell.
The walls and roofs of the adjacent hotel lobby collapsed, eyewitnesses said.
Pools of blood, broken glass and charred debris littered the driveway running past the hotel complex.
Staff working at the American-run hotel said the blast felt like "an enormous earthquake."
"I heard a big bang and I tried to get out of the building as quickly as possible," Asroni, a hotel employee, told The Associated Press as he picked bits of glass from his uniform.
"The smoke was getting into my lungs," he said, recalling how he had fought his way out of the burning hotel entrance.
One guest at the hotel, Australian tourist Simon Leuning had just checked in and was relaxing in his room when the explosion occurred.
"The window blew in, blew me across the room," he told Reuters Television. "I got out of there as fast as I could."
An office worker in nearby tower block told the Associated Press the noise was so loud he thought "a plane must have hit the building."
Emergency services were quickly on the scene, rushing many of the injured away on stretchers. One man was missing part of his leg.
Body parts and charred debris were scattered close to where the bomb exploded near a taxi stand outside the hotel.
The blast also attracted a large crowd of onlookers and police shooed away hundreds of people fearing that another bomb might go off or that the fires might trigger further explosions.
-- Reporter Amy Chew contributed to this report
Copyright 2004 CNN. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Associated Press contributed to this report.
