Girl, 8, in family suicide bomb attack on Indonesia police station

A FAMILY of five, including a child, carried out the suicide bombing of police station headquarters in Indonesia’s second-largest city, Surabaya, yesterday, a day after a deadly wave of attacks on churches staged by another family.

The spate of bombings has rocked Indonesia, with the Islamic State group claiming the church attacks and raising fears about its influence in Southeast Asia as its dreams of a Middle Eastern caliphate fizzle.

Indonesia has long struggled with Islamist militancy, including the 2002 Bali bombings that killed more than 200 people -- mostly foreign tourists -- in the country’s worst terror attack yet. Security forces have arrested hundreds of militants during a sustained crackdown that smashed some networks, and most recent attacks have been low-level and targeted domestic security forces.

But that changed on Sunday as a family of six, including two young girls, staged suicide bombings of churches during morning services in Surabaya, killing 14.

Yesterday, members of another family attacked the police station in Surabaya, wounding 10.

“There were five people on two motorbikes. One of them was a little kid,” national police chief Tito Karnavian said. “This is one family.”

An eight-year-old girl from the family survived the attack and was taken to hospital, while her mother, father and two brothers died in the blast, he said.

The father of the church suicide bombers was a local leader in extremist network Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD) which supports IS.

“It ordered its cells to make a move,” Karnavian said of the church attacks.

He said the attacks might also have been motivated by the arrest of JAD leadership, including jailed radical Aman Abdurrahman, and were linked to a deadly prison riot staged by Islamist prisoners at a high-security jail near Jakarta last week.

Abdurrahman has been connected to several deadly incidents, including a 2016 gun and suicide attack in the capital Jakarta that left four attackers and four civilians dead.

Despite their apparent allegiance to IS, the church-bombing family were not returnees from Syria, police said yesterday.

However, hundreds of Indonesians have flocked in recent years to fight alongside IS in its bid to carve out a caliphate ruled by strict Islamic law. Its efforts have been fizzling quickly as it has lost most of the land it once occupied in Iraq and Syria. On Sunday evening, just hours after the church bombings, a further three people in another family were killed and two wounded when another bomb exploded at an apartment complex about 30km from Surabaya.

Police said the father in the church bombings -- Dita Oepriyanto -- was a confidante of the man killed in the apartment, who police said had a bomb detonator in his hand when he was shot by authorities.

“When we searched the flat, we found pipe bombs, similar to those we found near the churches,” Karnavian said. – AFP