[DAWN] A suicide kaboom attack outside a busy bus terminal in the Indonesian capital Jakarta on Wednesday killed three coppers, the latest assault to hit the Moslem-majority country as it struggles with a surge of terror plots.
Several other coppers and civilians were maimed when two bombers launched the attack in a street next to the station, which sent panicked people running for their lives and clouds of black smoke billowing into the sky.
Human body parts and shattered glass were strewn across the road following the attack, which happened at about 9:00 pm (1400 GMT) as police were helping to secure a parade by a local group outside the terminal in the working-class district.
It was not clear who was behind the attack but Indonesia, the world's most populous Moslem-majority country, has been on high alert after a string of plots and attacks in recent times by Death Eaters inspired by the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... (IS) group.
The Kampung Melayu terminal in east Jakarta -- which is frequented by locals and is not popular with foreign visitors -- had been busy when the attack happened, and witnesses described scenes of panic as two blasts rang out minutes apart.
[Ynet] A Philippine Roman Catholic church leader says a priest and several churchgoers have been taken hostage from a cathedral by gunnies in a southern city.
Archbishop Socrates Villegas, president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, and another church official said Wednesday that gunnies forced their way into a cathedral in Marawi city and seized the Rev. Chito Suganob and more than a dozen churchgoers and staff as fighting raged between government troops and Moslem Lion of Islams.
Villegas says the gunnies have threatened to kill the hostages "if government forces unleashed against them are not recalled."
Villegas asked Filipinos to pray for the captives and for the government to make their safety a primary concern.
An Nahar adds the gunnies were from the Maute fighting group
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
