Indonesian security forces shot and killed three separatist rebels who were suspected in an attack that killed a New Zealander near the world’s largest gold mine in the easternmost province of Papua, police said yesterday.
Clashes near the Grasberg copper and gold mine began on Feb. 29, and had left two security personnel and four rebels dead. On Monday last week, eight gunmen shot and killed New Zealand miner Graeme Thomas Wall when he and six employees of PT Freeport Indonesia were in a parking lot at the company’s office in the restive province.
Two Indonesian miners were in critical condition while four others suffered minor injuries.
The West Papua Liberation Army, the military wing of the Free Papua Organization, claimed responsibility for the attacks. Spokesman Sebby Sambom warned mine employees to leave the area that the group declared a battle zone.
Rebels in Papua have been fighting a low-level insurgency since the early 1960s, when Indonesia annexed the region that was a former Dutch colony. Papua was formally incorporated into Indonesia in 1969 after a UN-sponsored ballot that was seen as a sham.
The mine, which is nearly half owned by US-based Freeport-McMoRan and is run by PT Freeport Indonesia, is seen by separatists as a symbol of Indonesian rule and has been a frequent target.
The current violence caused about 2,000 villagers to flee to neighboring Timika.
Local police chief Era Adhinata said that security forces on Thursday raided a house owned by a security guard of PT Freeport Indonesia, who also was a rebel supporter.
They shot and killed two suspected rebels in a gunfight, arrested the owner, and seized weapons and a “morning star” flag of the separatist movement.
Adhinata said that the two slain rebels had been identified as gunmen in the shooting of the New Zealander and the others.
He said that security forces on Friday killed another rebel during a shootout in the Mount Botak of Tembagapura mining district, and seized an assault rifle and ammunition.
A National Liberation Army of West Papua commander, Lekagak Telenggen, confirmed the police claim in a statement released yesterday. He called on the US and Indonesia to stop the gold mine operations in Papua.
“We have sacrificed a lot ... but we will keep fighting for the freedom of Papua,’’ he said.
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS