Jakarta bus station double suicide bombing kills three police officers

Two suspected suicide bombers killed three Indonesian police officers and injured 10 people on Wednesday night in twin blasts near a bus station in the eastern part of the capital, police have said.

The explosions went off minutes apart on Wednesday night at Jakarta's Kampung Melayu terminal, police said.

National police spokesman Setyo Wasisto said three officers had been killed, and that examination of the scene had shown that there appeared to have been two suicide bombers, not one as originally thought. Five officers and five civilians were wounded, he said.

National police spokesman Awi Setyono described the Jakarta blasts as a "global terrorist attack", but said police were still investigating whether the attackers had direct orders from Syria or elsewhere.

Police have not yet named the two dead suspects but a law enforcement source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they may have been linked to Jemaah Ansharut Daulah, an umbrella organization on a US State Department "terrorist" list that is estimated to have drawn hundreds of Islamic State sympathisers in Indonesia.

The attack was the deadliest in Indonesia since January 2016, when eight people were killed, four of them attackers, after suicide bombers and gunmen attacked the capital.

"We must continue to keep calm (and) keep cool. Because ... we Muslims are preparing to enter the month of Ramadan for fasting," President Joko Widodo said in a statement.

Authorities in the world's biggest Muslim-majority nation are increasingly worried about a surge in radicalism, driven in part by a new generation of militants inspired by the Islamic State group.

Indonesia has suffered a series of mostly low-level attacks by Islamic State sympathisers in the last 17 months.

In January 2016, four militants killed four people in a gun and bomb assault in the heart of Jakarta.

While most of the attacks since then have been poorly organised, authorities believe about 400 Indonesians have gone to join the militant group in Syria, and could pose a more lethal threat if they come home.