International
Child used in suicide bomb attack on Indonesian police
Suicide bomb attack on Indonesian police
May 14, 2018 | 09:58 AM
A family of militants in Indonesia carried an eight-year-old into a suicide bomb attack against police in Surabaya on Monday, a day after another militant family killed 13 people in suicide attacks on three churches in the same city.
The suicide bombers rode two motorbikes up to a checkpoint outside a police station and blew themselves up, Tito Karnavian, the police chief in Indonesia's second-largest city, told a news conference.He said the child survived the explosion, and CCTV footage showed a child stumbling around in the aftermath.Four officers and six civilians were wounded in the attack, East Java police spokesman Frans Barung Mangera said.President Joko Widodo branded the attacks in Surabaya the "act of cowards", and pledged to push through a new anti-terrorism bill to combat militant networks.After some major successes tackling Islamist militancy since 2001, there has been a resurgence in recent years, including in January 2016 when four suicide bombers and gunmen attacked a shopping area in central Jakarta. Police suspected Sunday's attacks on the churches were carried out by a cell of the Islamic State-inspired group Jemaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), an umbrella organisation on a US State Department terrorist list that is reckoned to have drawn hundreds Indonesian sympathisers of Islamic State."In the case of Surabaya, they escaped detection, but once it happened we moved fast to identify their network," Karnavian said.The father of the family involved in those attacks was the head of a JAD cell in the city, the police chief said.
May 14, 2018 | 09:58 AM