Last Updated Jan 15, 2018 3:02 AM EST
JAKARTA, Indonesia — A mezzanine floor inside the Jakarta Stock Exchange tower collapsed on Monday, injuring more than 50 people and forcing a chaotic evacuation.
MetroTV footage showed the lobby strewn with debris and people being helped out of the building while others lay on the grass or steps outside the tower.
National police spokesman Setyo Wasisto said victims were taken to three hospitals.
Most of the injured were college students from Palembang in Sumatra who were visiting the stock exchange as part of a study tour.
Wasisto ruled out terrorism as a cause of the collapse. “There is no bomb element in the incident,” he said.
The stock exchange remained open for its afternoon trading session and its general manager, Tito Sulistio, asserted no one had been killed.
“I guarantee that there were no fatalities,” he said. “I helped evacuate the victims to the park and as far as I know, the worst injuries are fractures.”
He said the exchange will pay the students’ medical costs.
The building is one of a two-tower complex that was hit by a car bombing by Islamist militants in September 2000, the Reuters news agency points out.
Reuters says images on television and social media “showed a mangled metal structure that had collapsed around a Starbucks cafe near the entrance to the lobby.”
The news agency quotes Vindy, a personal assistant to the exchange’s president director as saying, “The second floor of the building has collapsed.”
Megha Kapoor, who works in the building and was in the lobby at the time, told Reuters, “Slabs of concrete started to fall, there was lots of dust. Water pipes had burst. I heard a loud cracking sound. I saw a lady unconscious stuck under slab of concrete.”
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