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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
RSS