A family of six ignited suicide attacks on Christians attending Sunday services at three churches in Indonesia’s second-largest city of Surabaya, killing at least 13 people and wounding 40, officials said.
Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, has seen a recent resurgence in homegrown militancy and police said the family who carried out the May 13 attacks were among 500 Islamic State sympathisers who had returned from Syria.
“The husband drove the car, an Avanza, that contained explosives and rammed it into the gate in front of that church,” East Java Police spokesman Frans Barung Mangera told reporters at the regional police headquarters in Surabaya.
The wife and two daughters were linked in an attack on a second church and at the third church “two other children rode the motorbike and had the bomb across their laps”, Mr. Mangera said.
The two daughters were aged 12 and nine while the other two, thought to be the man’s sons, were 18 and 16, police said.
They blamed the bombings on the Islamic State-inspired group Jemaah Ansharut Daulah – JAD which is an umbrella organisation on a U.S. State Department terrorist list that is estimated to have drawn hundreds of Islamic State sympathisers in Indonesia.
“This act is barbaric and beyond the limits of humanity, causing victims among members of society, the police and even innocent children,” President Joko Widodo said during a visit to the scene of the attacks.
Streets around the bombed churches were obstructed by checkpoints and heavily armed police stood guard as forensic and bomb squad officers combined the area for clues.
Indonesia has had some major successes tackling militancy inspired by al Qaeda’s attacks on the United States in 2001. But there has been a resurgence of Islamist activity in recent years, some of it linked to the rise of Islamic State.
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The most vital incident was in January 2016 when four suicide bombers and gunmen invaded a shopping area in central Jakarta.
Churches have also been targeted previously, including near-simultaneous attacks on churches there at Christmas in 2000 that killed about 20 people.
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