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JAKARTA (AFP) – Extremists linked to the Islamic State killed four people in a remote Christian community on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, authorities said on Saturday (November 28), with one victim beheaded and another burned to death.
The group of sword-and-gun attackers ambushed the village of Lembantongoa in Central Sulawesi province on Friday morning, killing several residents and setting fire to half a dozen houses, including one used for prayers and regular services, he said. police.
No arrests have yet been made and the motive for the attack was not immediately clear.
But authorities pointed the finger at the Sulawesi-based East Indonesian Mujahideen (MIT), one of dozens of radical groups across the Southeast Asian archipelago that have sworn allegiance to ISIS.
Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, has long battled Islamist militancy and terrorist attacks, while Central Sulawesi has witnessed intermittent violence between Christians and Muslims for decades.
“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.
Lembantongoa village chief Rifai, who like many Indonesians has a name, said one victim was beheaded and another nearly beheaded.
One of the other male victims was stabbed while a fourth was burned to death at home, he added.
“Some neighbors managed to escape, but the victims did not,” Rifai told AFP.
Christians in Indonesia have been targeted in the past, including in 2018 when the ISIS-linked Jamaah Ansharut Daulah group staged a wave of suicide bombings by families, including young children, at churches in the second largest city. of the country, Surabaya, and killed a dozen parishioners.
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 police efforts 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.
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