ASSOCIATED PRESS, Tuesday March 22,2005 3:25 PM
19 injured in new sectarian violence in Indonesia's Ambon
province
Nineteen people were injured in sectarian violence in the eastern Indonesian province
of Maluku, police said Tuesday.
The violence erupted late Monday, when a hand grenade hurled by two unidentified
men on a motorcycle exploded in a Muslim neighborhood in the provincial capital,
Ambon, injuring five residents, said local police chief Lt. Col. Leonidas Braksan.
Muslims angered by the blast attacked a bus carrying Christians in the nearby
Kapaha neighborhood, damaging the vehicle and clubbing its passengers. They also
attacked motorcycle taxi drivers, injuring a total of 14 people.
Witnesses said police fired warning shots to disperse the Muslim attackers.
Some of the injured were reported to be in serious condition.
Braksan declined to speculate on the motive for the bombing, and said the situation
had returned to normal.
The blast was the second this month in Ambon, about 2,600 kilometers (1,600 miles)
northeast of Jakarta. On April 5, unidentified attackers hurled a grenade at a group of
motorcycle taxi drivers in a Christian district, injuring three.
Maluku province was ravaged by Muslim-Christian fighting between 1999 and 2001
that left at least 6,000 people dead.
A peace deal stemmed the worst of the fighting, but sporadic violence continues in
the region.
In April last year, a march in Ambon by the region's small Christian separatist
movement triggered four days of armed clashes in which about 40 people perished
and hundreds of houses were torched.
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