Snipers killed one policeman and wounded two in Indonesia's strife-torn Ambon yesterday, aiming at police and soldiers patrolling the streets to restore order, officials and witnesses said.
Although the death toll from the violence between Christian and Muslim residents rose to some 25, there were signs the fighting that flared over the weekend was dying down.
Nevertheless, the UN said 44 Indonesian staff and their families were leaving the eastern city yesterday. A UN office was among a number of buildings burnt when the violence erupted on Sunday.
Three policemen from the Jakarta mobile brigade were shot in one of the neighborhoods that has seen the worst violence, said Hamid Kasim, an editor of a local newspaper.
Kasim said locals shouted slogans blaming Christians when a wounded policeman was carried into the city's main mosque.
"People became agitated," he said.
A police spokesman said one policeman was killed, disputing earlier witness accounts that two had died.
The Indonesian government has sent 400 police and two army battalions to restore peace in the provincial capital of the eastern Moluccas archipelago. The violence has wounded about 150 people, officials say.
Analysts said complacency was partly to blame for the unrest, which stemmed from an event that has long created tension in a region still traumatized by three years of widespread sectarian fighting that killed 5,000 people before a peace deal was signed in early 2002.
The latest clashes began after police arrested people trying to raise the banned flag of a little known and mostly Christian rebel group, the South Moluccas Republic Movement (RMS), on the anniversary of a failed independence bid 54 years ago.
"The current conflict came about because of police complacency and competition among security forces over territory, between individuals in the police and the army," said defense analyst Kusnanto Anggoro.
"Containment of this flare-up will depend on how that problem is resolved. I don't believe this is coincidental."
On Monday, violence was concentrated in two mixed neighborhoods where scores of houses and a university were set ablaze. The incident prompted shops to close and halted transport in several parts of the city.
Despite the sniper shooting, Ambon was largely free of the street battles and the arson of the past two days.
"There are no more torchings. The troop reinforcements have made the conflict drop drastically. The local government has spread them around sensitive places and people are seeing things get back to normal today," said city official Isaac Saimima. "Very few Christians support RMS."
Another official said she could still hear gunfire and explosions but far less than on Sunday, when the sounds of home-made bomb blasts and shouting mobs filled the air.
Many shops and government offices had reopened.
An official from the UN Development Program said UN staff could return when security improved. The UN has been involved in rebuilding efforts.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
SECRETIVE SECT: Tetsuya Yamagami was said to have held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family after his mother donated about ￥100m The gunman accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe yesterday pleaded guilty, three years after the assassination in broad daylight shocked the world. The slaying forced a reckoning in a nation with little experience of gun violence, and ignited scrutiny of alleged ties between prominent conservative lawmakers and a secretive sect, the Unification Church. “Everything is true,” Tetsuya Yamagami said at a court in the western city of Nara, admitting to murdering the nation’s longest-serving leader in July 2022. The 45-year-old was led into the room by four security officials. When the judge asked him to state his name, Yamagami, who
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
DEADLY PREDATORS: In New South Wales, smart drumlines — anchored buoys with baited hooks — send an alert when a shark bites, allowing the sharks to be tagged High above Sydney’s beaches, drones seek one of the world’s deadliest predators, scanning for the flick of a tail, the swish of a fin or a shadow slipping through the swell. Australia’s oceans are teeming with sharks, with great whites topping the list of species that might fatally chomp a human. Undeterred, Australians flock to the sea in huge numbers — with a survey last year showing that nearly two-thirds of the population made a total of 650 million coastal visits in a single year. Many beach lovers accept the risks. When a shark killed surfer Mercury Psillakis off a northern Sydney beach last
RSS