Suicide bombings reveal new terrorism threat — families
JAKARTA, Indonesia — A wave of deadly bombings Sunday and Monday and evidence of more planned have shaken Indonesia just before the holy month of Ramadan, with entire families — including children — carrying out suicide attacks against Christian worshipers and the police.
The troubling discovery Monday of a trove of completed bombs in a housing complex outside Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city, came a day after members of a single family carried out three attacks against separate churches in the city, killing seven people.
On Sunday night, three members of another family, including a child, were killed when a bomb exploded in their apartment outside Surabaya when the police moved in to arrest them.
And on Monday morning, a family of five riding on two motorcycles detonated a bomb at the entrance of the Surabaya police headquarters — killing all but one of them and injuring four police officers. An 8-year-old girl who was with the attackers survived the blast and was taken to the hospital.
The extent of the carnage and the fact that children were enlisted in the attacks drew condemnation from the country’s leader, President Joko Widodo, who called them “barbaric.” All told, 12 civilians and 13 terrorist suspects were dead from two days of violence, with at least 46 people injured, including police officers.
Gen. Tito Karnavian, chief of the National Police, said the family suspected in Sunday’s attacks had recently returned to Indonesia after being deported from Syria. The bombs that exploded Sunday and Monday were similar in their construction — highly-powerful and sensitive to movement — to those used by the Islamic State group in its war in Iraq and Syria, Karnavian said. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attacks.
But the use of children in terrorist plots, analysts say, represents a new and shocking development in Indonesia.
“It was in one way expected and also completely unexpected, and that raises it to a new level of sick, using kids in this kind of thing,” said Ken Conboy, a security consultant and counterterrorism analyst in Jakarta.