A suicide bomber blew himself up outside a packed Roman Catholic cathedral on Indonesia’s Sulawesi Island during a Palm Sunday Mass, wounding at least 14 people, police said.
A smartphone 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.
The attack came as Indonesia was on high alert following the arrest of Jemmaah Islamiyah leader Aris Sumarsono in December last year.
Photo: Reuters / Antara Foto / Arnas Padda
Wilhelmus Tulak, a Catholic priest who led the Mass when the bomb exploded at about 10:30am, told reporters that a loud bang shocked his congregation, who had just finished the Sunday service marking the beginning of the holy week before Easter.
The first batch of churchgoers was walking out of the church while another group was coming in when the blast happened, he said.
Security guards suspected two motorists who wanted to enter the church, Tulak said, adding that one of them detonated his explosives and died near the gate after being confronted by the guards.
Photo: AP
The wounded included four guards and several churchgoers.
Indonesian National Police spokesperson Argo Yuwono told a news conference in the capital, Jakarta, that police were still trying to identify two attackers on a motorbike who used powerful explosives.
He said that police were investigating whether they were linked to a local affiliate of the banned Jemaah Islamiyah network or were acting independently.
About 64 suspects had been detained by the Indonesian Counterterrorism Special Detachment 88 in several provinces, including 19 in February in Makassar.
The arrests followed a tipoff about possible attacks against police and places of worship.
Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, has been battling militants since bombings on the resort island of Bali in 2002 killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists.
Attacks aimed at foreigners have in the past few years been largely replaced by smaller, less deadly strikes targeting the Indonesian government, police and anti-terrorism forces, and people militants consider as infidels.
A court banned Jemaah Islamiyah in 2008, and the group was weakened by a sustained crackdown. A new threat has in the past few years emerged, inspired by the Islamic State (IS) group’s attacks abroad.
The country’s last major attack was in May 2018, when two families carried out suicide bombings 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 that the father was the leader of local IS affiliate Jemaah Anshorut Daulah.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened