Failed suicide blast at church in Indonesia
Would-be bomber injures priest with axe
JAKARTA: A would-be suicide bomber failed to detonate in a packed church in western Indonesia during Sunday Mass and injured a priest with an axe before he was restrained, police said.
The assailant left a bench and ran towards a priest at the altar but a bomb in his backpack did not go off, said national police spokesman Maj Gen Boy Rafli Amar.
The man kept running towards the priest who was giving a sermon with a burning backpack, as the shocked congregation chased and captured him.
Before he was restrained, he managed to take an axe from the backpack and attacked the priest, Albert Pandiangan, 60, causing a slight injury on his hand, Mr Amar said.
The motive of the attack at the Roman Catholic St Yoseph Church in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra province, was not clear. Police were interrogating the 18-year old man, who told them that he was not working alone, Mr Amar said, without providing details.
Churchgoers yesterday quickly caught the attacker and called the police.
Eyewitness, Markus Harianto Manullan, said: “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.”
A picture of the attacker’s ID card circulating online said he was Muslim.
In recent years t here 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.
In July a suicide bomber linked to the Islamic State group blew himself up outside a police station in Central Java.