A blast rocked the Roman Catholic Cathedral compound in the eastern Indonesian city of Makassar on Sunday morning, setting off a quiet Sunday for Christians.
The blast took place at 10:20 a.m. at the entrance to the Sacred Heart Jesus f Jesus Cathedral compound, Indonesia’s national police spokesman, Inspector General Raden Prabowo Argo Yuvono, said.
No church goers were killed, but at least 14 people are being treated for injuries at Makasar hospitals, Mr Argo said.
Shortly before the blast, he said, two people on a motorcycle were stopped by church security personnel who feared the mass was coming to an end in the same way they were trying to target the cathedral.
In a video of the site taken immediately after the explosion, smoked rubbish and palm bottoms scattered on the ground.
Mr Argo said numerous body parts had been found around the scene, and police were trying to determine if they belonged to people on motorcycles.
Father Wilhelm Tulke, the cathedral’s priest, told Metro TV, an Indonesian network, that a parking attendant was burned to death as he tried to stop two motorcyclists, who he said looked suspicious.
The body parts were found 200 meters away, Mohamed Ramadhan Pomanto, mayor of Makassar, a multifaceted port city of about 1.5 million people on the island of Sulawesi, told Metro TV.
Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, has a significant Christian minority. In recent years, Islamic State’s Southeast Asian allies have targeted Christian monasteries there and mostly in the Catholic Philippines.
In 2018, three Christian churches were bombed in Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city, killing dozens of tourists. The suicide bomber was a married couple and their four children. Within days, members of two other families also blew themselves up in Surabaya and blew themselves up.
Last year, a third Roman Roman Catholic cathedral was bombed on the southern Philippine island of Jolo, killing at least 14 people. Like the Surabaya bombing, a local Islamic State affiliate has claimed responsibility for the strike. The 2019 suicide attack on the same cathedral, which killed more than 20 people, was carried out by an Indonesian couple.
An Indonesian council of Muslim clerics has condemned the Makassar bombing, calling it inhumane and opposing the teachings of all religions in the country. The council requested that the incident not be linked to any particular religion.
