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JAKARTA: Indonesian police were on Saturday (November 28) searching for suspected militants accused of killing four people and setting fire to seven houses in a village in Central Sulawesi province.
National Police spokesman Awi Setiyono said he believes Friday’s assault on the Lemban Tongoa village of Sigi district was carried out by the Sulawesi-based East Indonesia Mujahideen (MIT) group.
It is one of dozens of radical groups throughout the Southeast Asian archipelago that have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.
The police spokesman quoted a witness as saying that the militants beheaded one victim and cut the throats of the others.
Ahmad Rifai, an official from Lemban Tongoa village, said one of the burned buildings was a Christian house of worship.
“We concluded that they (the attackers) were from MIT after showing photographs of their members to the families of the victims” who witnessed the ambush, said Sigi Regency Police Chief Yoga Priyahutama.
The makeshift church was empty at the time of the morning attack by about eight militants, he added.
“People were in their houses when it happened,” Priyahutama said.
No arrests have yet been made and the motive for the attack was not immediately clear.
Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, has long struggled with militancy and terrorist attacks, while Central Sulawesi has witnessed intermittent violence between Christians and Muslims for decades.
“This attack is another serious escalation against the Christian minority in Indonesia,” Human Rights Watch researcher Andreas Harsono told Reuters.
Gomar Gultom, the head of the Communion of Churches in Indonesia, told Reuters that the victims were Christians and urged authorities to solve the case.
International Christian Concern, a Washington-based advocacy group, posted on its website Friday that “an alleged terrorist” killed four Christians in the Sulawesi village, setting fire to a Salvation Army post and Christian homes.
The investigation into Friday’s killing, led by the Indonesian police and army, may encounter obstacles as the incident took place in a remote and mountainous village, said police spokesman Setiyono.
“We are on the ground now, there are about 100 people who will start chasing,” he added.
If confirmed to be the work of MIT, Friday’s killings would be its first significant attack since the organization’s leader was assassinated four years ago by Indonesia’s elite counterterrorism squad, according to Sidney Jones, a Jakarta-based terrorism expert. .
“Through the attack … they want to show that the efforts of the police to arrest and kill members of the group had no effect on them,” he said.
In 2018, MIT was believed to have sent radicals posing as humanitarian workers to the central Sulawesi earthquake and tsunami that hit the city of Palu in an attempt to recruit new members, Jones said.
