JAKARTA, 29 May 2005 — Two bombs exploded yesterday at a busy market in central Indonesia, killing at least 22 people and wounding 40 others, but the government said the attacks were not related to years of sectarian violence in the area.
The blasts occurred in the morning at a market in Sulawesi Island’s Christian-dominated town of Tentena, said Police Maj. Riky Naldo, the deputy chief of police in nearby Poso town.
Two policemen were among the wounded, Naldo said.
“The latest report says 22 people were killed,” Vice President Jusuf Kalla told a news conference in Makassar, the provincial capital of South Sulawesi.
Kalla said he believed the explosion was carried out by terrorists, but that the attacks were not linked to long-running sectarian violence in the area.
“It was carried out by the terrorists instead of warring Muslim and Christian factions,” he said. “The motive of the perpetrators is to disturb the security situation in Poso.”
Tentena is about 60 km from Poso, where fighting between Muslims and Christians claimed at least 1,000 lives in 2000-2002. Those clashes were an offshoot of a larger Muslim-Christian conflict in the nearby Maluku archipelago, fomented by Laskar Jihad, a militia from Indonesia’s main island of Java. Large-scale clashes have since died down, but over the past year the island has seen an increase in bombings and attacks on individuals.
Kalla described yesterday’s bombers as “terrorists from outside” Sulawesi, but declined to say precisely who they were. “Maybe this group also will make trouble in other places. The problem of terrorism is the problem of the world,” he said.
In January, police found 60 homemade bombs in an abandoned house in Poso.
