7 killed in bomb attack in Indonesian police HQ
A bomb attack on a police headquarters in Surabaya has killed at least seven people, an Indonesian police official has said, a day after 13 people were killed in the city during coordinated suicide bombings targeting three churches, reports The Guardian.
The blast occurred at 8.50am, said East Java police spokesman Frans Barung Mangera, killing at least seven people. “There has been an explosion, we don’t know exactly what happened,” he said.
CCTV footage from the scene appears to show a motorcycle driving up to the police station car park, with a man driving and a woman at the back. They then detonate the explosives at a security checkpoint.
Monday’s blast comes after a bomb explosion in an apartment building in East Java killed three people on Sunday evening, just kilometres away and hours after Sunday’s Surabaya attack. Residents reported hearing multiple blasts from the fifth floor of the Wonocolo apartment building in Sidoarjo, at about 9pm on Sunday.
Frans Burung Mangera said the explosion killed three people: a father, mother and their child. Two other children, a son and daughter from the same family, were rushed to Siti Khodijah hospital for treatment.
Police are investigating possible links between the Sidoarjo and Surabaya blasts but are yet to provide further details.
Local news portal Kumparan reported the father, identified as Anton, was holding the trigger to a bomb when police arrived. He was shot dead before he could detonate.
The news follows the horrific events of Sunday morning, when a family of six - a couple and their four children aged between nine and 18 - conducted consecutive suicide bombing attacks on three churches in Surabaya, one less than 14km from the Sidoarjo apartment.
The severity of the attack, the most deadly terrorist strike in Indonesia in more than a decade, and revelations that a family with young children were behind it, has shocked Indonesia.
President Joko Widodo and Indonesian religious leaders have condemned the attacks as barbaric.
The death toll from the church bombings rose to 13 overnight, when an eight-year-old victim died from organ failure. Forty-three others were wounded.
Six of the dead were those who carried out the attack: Dita and his wife Puji and their four children - two sons, Yusuf, 18, Firman, 16, and two daughters, Fadhila 12, and Famela, nine.
The national police chief said he suspected they had recently returned from Syria, and that Dita was the Surabaya head of the Isis-affiliated Jamaah Anshorut Daulah (JAD) militant group.
