Police arrest 22 people over attacks in Ambon
Police arrest 22 people over attacks in Ambon
Agence France Presse/Jakarta
Police in the religiously divided province of Maluku said they arrested 22 people on Friday over a series of attacks, in a village where one of the Bali bombers once lived.
The 22 suspects -- including an ex-intelligence officer with the Ambon Police, Muhammad Syarif Tarabubun -- were detained in Hayar village in Central Maluku's Tehoru area, where convicted Bali bomber Imam Samudra used to live.
The group was believed to have carried out "a spate of various attacks" in recent years on Ambon city, the main town in Maluku, provincial police chief Brig. Gen. Adityawarman said as quoted by AFP.
He said Syarif had been on the police wanted list and other detainees have said he was "the one who makes decisions" on terror targets in Ambon.
The police chief said the 33-year-old Samudra once lived in the village and detectives were searching for links between him and the suspects.
Samudra was one of three Islamic militants sentenced to death for their roles in the October 2002 Bali nightclub attack by the al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah extremist network that killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists.
Samudra attended planning meetings, selected the blast targets in Bali and assigned tasks to the bombers as part of what he saw as a holy war against the U.S. and its allies.
Ambon and other islands in Maluku were the scene of Muslim- Christian violence that left more than 5,000 people dead between 1999 and 2002, when a government-sponsored peace pact took hold.
Sporadic clashes and bombings persist.
Serious sectarian violence broke out in April 2004 after a procession by mainly Christian separatist supporters. Hundreds of homes and other buildings were torched and 38 people were killed.
In a separate development, the police dispatched dozens of officers to the Mamala and Morela subdistricts in Central Maluku regency, after a communal clash on Wednesday night in the area claimed one life and injured 15 others.
Over 10 houses were also burned down in the incident.
Comr. Deni Dariady, who led the deployment, said the situation was back to normal on Friday and police had seized various weapons from the warring parties, including homemade rifles and bombs, dozens of rounds of ammunition and sharp weapons such as machetes.
No arrests have been made and police are still investigating the case. The clash broke out after a minor understanding between people in the two subdistricts. Residents of Morela subdistrict demanded the inauguration of a cultural leader in the area had to be held in their subdistrict, as it had been for years, but people in Mamala subdistrict insisted the leader had to be inducted in Mamala.