Security forces opened fire as hundreds rioted in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra, yesterday, leaving at least one person dead and two injured, according to witnesses. Fury at fuel price rises erupted into violence for a third day.
A plainclothes security officer on a motorcycle opened fire on two teenage boys riding a motorbike as they tried to flee down an alleyway. The driver was hit in the head with a bullet and died instantly. His passenger was shot in the arm.
"This happened right outside my house, and we even took the motorcycle in for a moment. Later his elder brother came and he was crying and told us, `My brother is dead'," a witness said, asking not to be named.
Another witness said they saw another boy shot in the leg. It was not immediately possible to confirm the reports.
The riots were accompanied by looting. Mobs of angry crowds attacked Chinese-owned shops near the Kemiri market in Medan, 1,400 km north-west of Jakarta. East Medan's Tebung commercial area was littered with glass and debris where scores of shops, mostly owned by ethnic Chinese, had been looted and set on fire by hundreds of protesters.
Shops remained closed across most of the town and some were flying the national red-and-white flag, or had put out Muslim prayer mats and the words "indigenous" or "Muslim" in a move to ward off attacks.
Up to about 11,000 people also protested in the Central Java town of Yogyakarta in rallies that lasted into the early hours yesterday, witnesses said.
Tear gas was fired and police and soldiers entered universities in pursuit of protesters, Mr Jabal Nur, of the Legal Aid Institute chapter in the city, said.
Fresh rioting broke out again late yesterday in Jakarta and in Medan with security forces firing rubber bullets and at least a dozen students injured.
Clashes between students and security forces were also reported in the west Java city of Bandung as well as in Ujung Pandang.
Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Gordon Brown, urged President Suharto in talks yesterday to make political reforms to win the support of the international community.
"He has indicated that he wants to consider political reforms, but I did make it clear to him that the international community needed to know that political reforms were actually taking place," Mr Brown told a press conference in Jakarta.
And he spoke of the "human side" of the financial crisis at a luncheon. "It is the poor and the unemployed who have most to lose if reforms fail," he said.
The US also criticised the crackdown on protests and warned the government it must push through the IMF-mandated reforms, which led to Monday's 71 per cent rise in fuel and electricity charges when subsidies were lifted.
Indonesia's failure to carry out reforms would place the IMF loans in "serious jeopardy", the White House spokesman, Mr Michael McCurry, said.