After his suicide vest fails in church, ‘bomber’ attacks priest with axe

INDONESIA

A WOULD-BE suicide bomber’s explosives failed to detonate in a church in western Indonesia during Sunday Mass, and he injured a priest with an axe before being restrained, police said.

The 18-year-old assailant left a bench and ran toward the priest at the altar, but a bomb in his backpack only burned without exploding, said national police spokesman Maj. Gen. Boy Rafli Amar. A picture of the attacker’s ID card circulating online said he was Muslim.

Before he was restrained by members of the congregation, the man managed to take an axe from the backpack and attacked the Rev. Albert Pandiangan, causing an injury to the 60-yearold priest’s hand, Amar said.

The motive for the attack at the Roman Catholic St. Yoseph Church in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra province, was not clear, but the perpetrator carried a symbol indicating support for Islamic State.

Police were interrogating the man, who told them he was not working alone, Amar said, without providing details.

An eyewitness, Markus Harianto Manullan, said the assailant wore a jacket and carried a bag. “He sat in the same row as I did... I saw him fiddling with something in his jacket, and then I heard a small explosion and he immediately ran to the podium,” Manullan said.

In recent years there have been a number of attacks on religious minorities and others in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country.

A suicide attack in the Indonesian capital in January killed four attackers and four civilians, including a Westerner, and injured 19.