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SCMP Reporter

The gold watch read four minutes past 12. It was attached to a charred wrist and clenched hand pulled from the debris of the Plaza Sentral Klender mall where 200 perished in the most serious tragedy yet to emerge from the continuing sacking of Jakarta.

  Red Cross workers were late last night still sifting through the smoking, gutted shell of the five-storey shopping mall in east Jakarta.

 They had removed 90 intact bodies and remains of another 85 of those trapped when the Yogya department store within the mall burst into flames as anarchy engulfed the city on Thursday.

 Red Cross officials expected to find the remains of at least another 25 victims.

 Investigators believe the fire at the Klender mall was lit by other rioters. The stairwell to the five-storey building collapsed soon after the fire was lit.

 'These people fell victim to their own savagery,' said a member of staff who identified himself only as Joko at the nearby police station.

 A second fire was still smouldering at the Ramayana department store in the northern area of Tanjung Priok, where a group of looters were trapped when a gang set fire to the building, the Red Cross said.

 Rescuers had already dragged at least 54 bodies from the embers. The bodies of others were believed trapped on the top two floors of the four-storey building.

 A third fire set by looters in the industrial district of Tangerang, west of Jakarta, claimed at least 20 lives.

 In a fourth tragedy, police said a fire was still burning at a shopping mall in Jatinegara, also in east Jakarta, just three kilometres from Klender.

 A spokesman said rescuers had been unable to enter the building, but said people were known to have been trapped inside.

 The fires took the death toll of three days of protest, arson and pillage as President Suharto's 32-year rule plunges into anarchy to at least 275.

 About 10,000 foreigners, including an estimated 1,000 Hong Kong residents, fled to the airport to catch the first available flight out.

   President Suharto was reported to be deep within his rambling Cendana mansion, protected by Presidential Guard units for several kilometres around.

 The military said at least 800 people had been arrested for merely looking.

 Reports said rioting also erupted yesterday in Indonesia's second-largest city, Surabaya, when mobs went on a spree of violence which left one woman dead.

 The true death toll from the Klender shopping mall fire may never be known. As the search intensified, all that was left of many victims were the most scanty remains.

 Outside the building was a silvery carpet of broken and melted glass that yeilded half-eaten ice-cream cones, school books and children's slippers.

 The melted arches of a McDonald's sign dripped down one side.

 'We can't find our sister,' screamed local resident Elfie Zahara, 24, as she pressed her hands and face into a lamp-post and wept while waiting for news of her sister Chaerunisa, 17.

 'She went shopping with her friend and they didn't come back . . . we heard about a demonstration and we went to look but there was fire everywhere.

 'She went to buy some food . . . she was not stealing. She was just a young girl.'  Witnesses said hundreds poured into the locked building after looters forced open grilles on Thursday afternoon.

 Fire broke out soon afterwards and swiftly took hold. It burned through the night, floor by floor. As with so many burning buildings across the city, no emergency services even tried to douse the blaze.

 Eight people were seen leaping from upper floors. Five died when they hit the ground.

 As rescuers dodged falling beams and ash clouds at the front, demolition workers heaved a huge blackened safe from a gold shop on to a lorry out the back.

 The surrounding streets for several kilometres were peppered with burnt-out shops and cars. At road-blocks, soldiers were still engaged in running battles with looters late yesterday.

 Gunfire was heard and fresh columns of smoke rose across the city, including the Chinatown area of Glodok, where mobs turned vast areas of the quarter into no-go areas the day before.



200 die in Jakarta mall fire