The US Geological Survey said the 6.6 magnitude quake was located in the Indian Ocean about 88 kilometers (54 miles) southwest of Labuan, a coastal town in Banten province. It was centered at a depth of 37 kilometers (23 miles), he said.
The Indonesian Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency said there was no danger of a tsunami.
Earthquakes occur frequently in the sprawling archipelago, but are rarely felt in the capital, Jakarta. Residents of skyscrapers in the city of 10 million felt seconds of swaying. Even two-storey houses shook heavily in the satellite town of Tangerang.
‘The shaking was horrible…everything in my room was swaying,’ said Laila Anjasari, a Jakarta resident who lives on the 19th floor of an apartment building, ‘We ran up and down the stairs in a panic.’
Indonesia is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on major geological fault lines known as the Pacific “Ring of Fire”.
In January last year, a magnitude 6.2 earthquake killed at least 105 people and injured nearly 6,500 in West Sulawesi province.
In 2004, an extremely powerful earthquake in the Indian Ocean triggered a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in the Indonesian province of Aceh.
