7.2 Quake hits Indonisia! hundreds killed

JAKARTA, Indonesia - An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.2 triggered a tsunami warning Monday on Indonesia's Java Island and Australia's Christmas Island, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said.

The earthquake, which hit at 3:24 p.m. local caused tall buildings to sway in the Indonesian capital and at least one other city on Java Island for at least two minutes, witnesses said.

The quake had a magnitude of 7.2, and was centered 220 miles south of Jakarta in the Indian Ocean, according to the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center Web site.

The quake hit at 3:19 p.m. local time (4:19 a.m. ET).

Waves suddenly came and we ran to the hills. Four people from my group are still missing," said a woman who gave her name as Teti, and who said she had been accompanying Dutch tourists when the waves hit.

"Many small hotels were destroyed," she said. "Hotels on the beach front of Pangandaran ... the front parts are hit. Boats have been thrown into hotels," she said.

She told the radio that she saw three dead bodies being collected by residents. Pangandaran is on the south coast of West Java province.

Local police said residents found a corpse on the beach after they returned from higher ground.

"We've heard that there are several victims but so far we have received report of one person killed," First Brigadier Ujang told AFP.

There are 105 people dead from 10 regencies, 148 people are injured and 127 still missing," said Putu Suryawan, the official at the Indonesian Red Cross disaster centre, adding that 2,875 people had been displaced from their homes

One official told the Guardian they were too busy monitoring the aftershocks of the 7.7-magnitude quake that triggered the tsunami to raise the alarm. The government's science and technology minister, Kusmayanto Kadiman, confirmed today that Indonesia had received bulletins from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii and Japan's meteorological agency after the quake, but "we did not announce them".

Answering reporters' questions as to why no warning was issued on Monday, Vice President Jusuf Kalla claimed there was no need because most people had fled inland after the earthquake, fearing a tsunami.

"After the quake occurred, people ran to the hills ... so in actual fact there was a kind of natural early warning system," he said. However, of dozens of people interviewed by The Associated Press in Pangandaran on Tuesday, only one person said he felt a slight tremor. None said there was a mass movement of people to higher ground before the tsunami, though some residents recognized the danger when they saw the wall of water approaching.