Praying outdoors after quake destroys town

Mind your step: Muslim men walking on the rubble of a quake-hit building after Friday prayers in Gasol village, Cianjur, West Java. — AP

HUNDREDS of Indonesians prayed out in the open next to rice paddies and in the streets after an earthquake flattened their town in western Java and left nearly 300 of their community dead.

Muslim cleric Muhamad Jamhur led a congregation in prayer yesterday in an outdoor volleyball court just 200m from a mosque whose walls were left cracked and windows shattered by the shallow 5.6-magnitude quake that hit the town of Cianjur, about 75km south of the capital Jakarta, earlier this week.