Bomb attack in Indonesian Catholic church is foiled
Explosives fail to detonate but priest hurt in axe attack
JAKARTA // A would-be suicide bomber failed to detonate his explosives in a packed church in western Indonesia during Sunday mass but injured a priest with an axe before he was restrained, police said. Fr Albert Pandiangan was holding a mass in the city of Medan on the western island of Sumatra when a man approached him and stabbed his left arm, said chief detective Nur Fallah.
“Somebody tried to kill the priest by pretending to attend the church service and at that time tried to explode something like a firecracker but the firecracker didn’t explode, it only fumed,” said Mr Fallah.
The attacker carried a homemade explosive device, he said.
The man threw himself at the priest but was held by the congregation.
However, before he was restrained, the man took an axe from the backpack and attacked Fr Pandiangan, 60, causing a slight injury to his hand, said police spokesman Maj Gen Boy Rafli Amar.
An witness, Markus 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 ran to the podium,” Mr Manullan said.
The motivation behind the attack at the Roman Catholic St Yoseph Church in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra province, was not clear.
A photograph of the attacker’s identification card that was circulated online said he was a Muslim.
Police were interrogating the 18-year old man, who told them that he was not working alone, said Maj Gen Amar.
Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, has suffered a spate of deadly attacks by militants since the 2002 Bali bombings in which 202 people were killed.
In recent years there have been a number of attacks on religious minorities and others in Indonesia.
A suicide attack in Jakarta in January killed four attackers and four civilians, including a westerner, and injured 19. In July, a suicide bomber linked to the ISIL extremist group blew himself up outside a police station in Central Java.