Three teenage Christian girls were beheaded
and a fourth was seriously wounded in a savage attack on Saturday by
unidentified assailants in the Indonesian province of Central
Sulawesi.
The girls were among a group of students from
a private Christian high school who were ambushed while walking
through a cocoa plantation in Poso Kota subdistrict on their way to
class, police Major Riky Naldo said.
The area is close to the provincial capital of
Poso, about 1000 kilometres northeast of Jakarta.
Naldo said the heads of the three dead victims
were found several kilometres from their bodies.
In Jakarta, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono
ordered the police to begin a hunt for the killers.
"In the holy month of Ramadan, we are again
shocked by a sadistic crime in Poso that claimed the lives of three
school students," he told reporters at the airport as he prepared to
fly to Sumatra island.
"I condemn this barbarous killing, whoever the
perpetrators are and whatever their motives."
He ordered the security forces to find the
killers and maintain order in the region.
Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim
nation, but Central Sulawesi has a roughly equal number of Muslims
and Christians. The province was the scene of a bloody religious war
in 2001-2002 that killed around 1000 people from both communities.
At the time, beheadings, burnings and other
atrocities were common.
A government-mediated truce succeeded in
ending the conflict in early 2002, but there have since been a
series of bomb attacks and assassinations of Christians.
These included a blast at a market in Poso, a
predominantly Christian town, that killed 22 people in May.
Christian leaders have repeatedly accused the
authorities in Jakarta of not doing enough to find the perpetrators
and bring them to justice.
The Christian-Muslim conflict in Sulawesi was
an extension of a wider sectarian war in the nearby Maluku
archipelago in which up to 9000 perished between 1999 and 2002.
The Maluku conflict intensified soon after it
began with the arrival of volunteers belonging to Laskar Jihad, a
newly created militia from Indonesia's main island of Java that was
supported by hardline elements of the security forces.
Analysts and diplomats accused senior army
commanders of funding and training the militia, which was hurriedly
disbanded following the terrorist attacks on the tourist island of
Bali in 2002 which claimed 202 lives, including 88 Australians.
AP