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Southeast Asia

Indonesia: Explosion at church causes casualties Update: 20 maimed, 2 jacket wallahs toes up

2021-03-28

[DW] A suspected kaboom has rocked a Catholic church in the Indonesian city of Makassar on Palm Sunday, injuring several people.

A suspected jacket wallah blew themselves up outside a cathedral in Indonesia's South Sulawesi province on Sunday

The explosion took place at the main Catholic church in the city of Makassar and caused casualties, police said.

The congregation had been inside the church at the time of the earth-shattering kaboom, South Sulawesi police front man E. Zulpan told Rooters.

"We see that there are victims and parts of human bodies have been torn apart. We do not know yet whether they are from the perpetrator or from the people who were close by," he said.

PRIEST TELLS OF SEVERAL INJURED
Father Wilhemus Tulak, a priest at the church, told local media that the suspected bomber tried to enter the church grounds on a cycle of violence

, but had been stopped by a security guard.

Ten people had been maimed in total, some of them seriously, he said.

The explosion happened just after Sunday services wrapped up, the church's pastor told Metro TV. Video from the scene showed police had set up a cordon around the church and cars parked nearby were damaged.

The blast took place at 10:28 a.m. local time (0328 UTC/GMT).

The Kompas TV news channel said it was a suspected suicide kaboom.

NO CLAIM OF RESPONSIBILITY
Police did not say who might be responsible for the apparent attack and there was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Makassar is Indonesia's fifth-largest urban center after Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung and Medan, with a population of 1.5 million.

Churches have been targeted previously by Death Eaters in Indonesia, the world's biggest Moslem-majority nation. In 2018, a dozen people were killed when a family of suicide bombers blew themselves up at churches during Sunday services in the second-biggest city Surabaya.

The country's deadliest Islamist bully boy attack took place on the tourist island of Bali in 2002, when bombers killed 202 people, most of them foreign tourists.

Update from ABC News at 1:30 p.m. ET courtesy of Clem:

Two attackers have blown themselves up outside a packed Roman Catholic cathedral during a Palm Sunday Mass on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island, wounding at least 20 people.

A video obtained by The Associated Press showed body parts scattered near a burning motorbike at the gates of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Cathedral in Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi province.

Police later said both attackers were killed instantly and evidence collected at the scene indicated one of the two was a woman. The maimed included four guards and several churchgoers, police said.

The attack a week before Easter in the world's most populous Moslem-majority nation came as the country was on high alert following December's arrest of the leader of the Southeast Asian bad boy group, Jemaah Islamiyah, which has been designated a terror group by many nations.

President Joko Widodo condemned Sunday’s attack and said it has nothing to do with any religion as all religions would not tolerate any kind of terrorism.

"I call on people to remain calm while worshipping because the state guarantees you can worship without fear," Widodo said in a televised address.

He offered his prayers to those injured and said the government would cover all costs of medical treatment. He said he had ordered the national police chief to investigate the attack and crack down on any krazed killer network that may be involved.

At least 20 people were maimed in the attack and had been admitted to hospitals for treatment, said Mohammad Mahfud, the coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs.

Indonesia's National Police spokesperson Argo Yuwono said police were still trying to identify the two attackers on the cycle of violence and whether they were linked to a local affiliate of the banned Jemaah Islamiyah network or were acting independently.

Indonesian forces in December arrested the group's leader Aris Sumarsono, also known as Zulkarnaen. Over the past month the country's counterterrorism squad has arrested about 64 suspects, including 19 in Makassar, following a tipoff about possible attacks against police and places of worship.

While Jemaah Islamiyah has been weakened over the past decade by a sustained crackdown, in recent years a new threat has emerged in militants who fought with the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria and returned to Indonesia or those inspired by the group’s attacks abroad.

Indonesia's last major attack was in May 2018, when two families carried out a series of suicide bombings on churches in the second-largest city of Surabaya, killing a dozen people including two young girls whose parents had involved them in one of the attacks. Police said the father was the leader of a local affiliate of the Islamic State group known as Jemaah Anshorut Daulah.

...founded by our old friend Abu Bakar Bashir of Al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah fame, JAD (Partisans of the [Islamic] State) is an umbrella group of Indonesian extremists that claims allegiance to ISIS...

Posted by:trailing wife

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