A bomb ripped through a crowded karaoke cafe in central Indonesia, killing four people and injuring three others, police said yesterday.
The blast -- the latest in a series to hit the world's most populous Muslim nation -- occurred Saturday night in the town of Palopo in South Sulawesi province, Major Wisnu Wirdata said.
Sulawesi island was wracked by violence between its Muslim and Christian populations between 1999 and 2000, but police declined to speculate on whether the blast was linked to religious militants.
Four people -- including a waitress in the cafe -- were killed instantly, said Lieutenant Aziz, who uses a single name. Three others were being treated in a hospital. One was in a critical condition, but was expected to survive, hospital workers said.
The blast was caused by a low-explosive bomb planted on the second floor of the cafe, about 1,800km northeast of Jakarta, officers said.
All the dead and injured were Muslims, Aziz said.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing.
Fighting between Muslims and Christians in 1999 and 2000 left more than 1,000 dead in Central Sulawesi province. The violence did not spread to South Sulawesi, however.
On Oct. 12, 2002, suspected militants belonging to the al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah militant group blew up two nightclubs on Bali island, killing 202 people, most of them foreign tourists.
Several of the 29 people so far convicted in the Bali blasts cited revenge for the deaths of Muslims on Sulawesi, and the nearby Maluku islands, as a motive for the attacks.
Jemaah Islamiyah has also been linked to a December 2002 blast at a McDonald's restaurant in Makassar, also on Sulawesi island, that killed three.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
RSS