Three families behind ISIS-inspired bombings in Indonesia

INDONESIA - Three families, including young children, were involved in a series of ISIS-inspired bombings that hit the Indonesian city of Surabaya within just 24 hours, the country’s National Police said yesterday. The latest attack came yesterday when a family of four riding on two motorbikes packed with explosives targeted a police station in Indonesia’s second largest city, injuring 10 people including four police officers. The four attackers died, while an eight-year-old girl who was on one of the motorcycles was thrown clear and survived, police spokesman Frans Barung Mangera said. It followed a suicide attack involving a family of six on three Christian churches, when a husband and wife used their children to detonate explosives, killing 12 people and injuring at least 40. In what police also described as a terror incident, a mother and her 17-year-old daughter were killed in the Surabaya suburb of Sidoarjo, when a bomb, handled by the family’s father detonated prematurely. Police found the father of the family in the house holding a detonator, and shot him, police spokesman Barung Mangera said. The family’s 12-year-old son took his two younger sisters to the Bhayangkara Police hospital, he added. Tito Karnavian, Indonesia’s topranking police officer, told reporters that police were working on the assumption that the attacks followed a directive from ISIS Central Command to avenge the imprisonment of the former leaders of Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), an Indonesian jihadi group that supports ISIS. Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, has struggled in recent months with a rise in Islamist militancy, which has come as ISIS has been squeezed out of its heartland in Syria and Iraq. “These attacks are the nightmare scenario that’s been anticipated since Indonesians affiliated with ISIS have returned from the Middle East,” said Greg Barton, Chair in Global Islamic Politics at Deakin University in Australia.

(CNN)