INDONESIA:The basement car park at the Metropolitan medical centre was in a state of barely controlled chaos.
Bruised, bloodied and bandaged victims of yesterday's bombing of the Australian embassy were lying on stretchers, slumped in chairs or wandering around, shocked and confused by what had happened to them.
Surrounding them were the remnants of a hospital struggling to cope with the rush of casualties. Bowls of blood-soaked water and bandages congealed with flesh and blood littered the floor.
In one tiny office, the most badly injured were being attached to drips, while in another three bodies had been laid out.
The bloodstained sheets covering them were regularly pulled back for the benefit of the numerous television camera crews swarming through the area. "It's crazy here," said Sri Rudiawati, a nurse. "We have treated more than 50 people in about 45 minutes and still they are coming. I don't know how much longer we can go on like this for."
By the end of the day, staff at the centre, five buildings away from the embassy, would have treated about 100 people. The casualty toll was nine dead and more than 180 injured. Jeri Langi (46), a marketing executive, was gingerly touching the points on his head where shards of glass from his car windows had been embedded.
"I was trying to do a U-turn near the embassy when suddenly I heard a big bang and the whole place blew up," he said. "Then all the glass in the car shattered and the car stopped.
"I cried out, 'God help me!' I thought I was finished. I don't know where the bomb came from, I was so confused." He said he got out of his car into a scene of mayhem. "I saw lots of legs separated [from their] bodies. Hands and arms were also separated. I don't know how many, but it was a lot." Helped by passers-by, Mr Jeri was taken to the nearby hospital. Even though he was one of the first to arrive, he was taken to the car-park because there was nowhere else to put him.
As in all the buildings in the neighbourhood, all the windows in the seven-storey hospital on the side nearest the embassy were blown out. On the road the situation was equally chaotic. The 10-lane Rasuna Said street, one of the two main arteries through Jakarta's business district, was a carpet of broken glass, fallen leaves and branches and the occasional body part.
Thousands of workers from devastated office blocks lined the road, trying to find friends and colleagues from whom they had been separated, unhappy with the police trying to keep them back from the bomb site. "Give me a signal. Give me a signal," Erwien Kurniawan shouted at his mobile phone. "I need to call my wife. I need to tell her I'm OK."
Three Indonesian staff from the embassy were consoling each other. "We're just in such shock," said one of the women, who was shaking. "As I left the building I saw this dead woman under a pile of newspaper. She must have just collected her visa and was leaving the building.
"Next to her was her young son, crying like crazy. I don't know how come she died and he survived. Maybe she shielded him from the blast." Perhaps the luckiest of the survivors were Suri Rahayi (28) and Budi Hariyanto (30), who had just left the embassy compound after collecting visas.
"We were perhaps 10 steps from the gate when I saw this flash of light, and so we immediately threw ourselves to the ground," Ms Suri said. "That saved our lives, because there was then this huge explosion and bits of glass up to a metre long started falling. It was like rain." Mr Budi said: "After the explosion we got up and ran for safety."