It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been naughty or nice this year, Santa Claus is still going to check your car for bombs at one ritzy Indonesian hotel this Christmas.
At the Mandarin Oriental hotel, in the capital of the world’s most populous Muslim nation, a sleighful of Santas have been descending on cars as they enter the grounds in a bid to thwart potential Islamic extremist attacks.
Oscar, chief of the security guards, said guests have commented favourably on the hour-long stunt during which cheery hotel staff trained for bomb-hunting this week manned hand-held mirrors and metal-detecting wands.
”It makes visitors less tense,” he cited a guest as saying.
Indonesia is in lockdown mode ahead of Christmas amid scaled-up warnings of bombings or kidnappings.
Tens of thousands of police have marched out across the sprawling archipelago nation in anticipation of violence after Indonesian police cornered and killed Malaysian master bomb maker Azahari Husin last month.
Nineteen people were killed in a coordinated nationwide bombing campaign targeting churches and priests on Christmas Eve in 2000.
The attacks were the first major offensive blamed on the Jemaah Islamiyah network, of which Azahari was a key member. — Sapa-AFP