the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported late Friday, October 22. ABC Radio Australia quoted police as saying that the victim was inside the grounds of the Bethany Church in Poso town when he was shot in the neck late on Thursday. No suspects have been arrested, the radio network said.
Last week, a Hindu woman was reportedly killed and two Christian men were wounded when a group of attackers fired randomly into houses in Poso.
On the same day in a rural district south of the provincial capital Palu, two Christians reportedly died in a machete attack.
Among other violent incidents this year was the assassination in May of a Christian prosecutor who handled terrorism cases in Palu, ABC recalled.
The International Crisis Group reportedly blames many of the Christian deaths in Poso on Mujahidin KOMPAK, an outfit with loose affiliations to the Jemaah Islamiah extremist group.
EX-PRESIDENT INTERVENES
The latest incident came shortly after former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid reportedly expressed concern about attack against Indonesian Christians. Some 500 attacks against Catholic have been reported in the country in the last 14 years, AsiaNews claimed
Wahid specifically condemned the forced closure by local Muslim militants of the St Bernadette Catholic School in Cileduk, Banten province, 40 km (25 miles) west of the capital Jakarta.
The school is part of a compound managed by the Sisters of the Child Jesus and was forced shut in early October by members of the Islam Defenders Front (Front Pembela Islam or FPI), AsiaNews, a well informed Catholic news service, reported.
GYM SERVICES
For the past ten years, local Catholics apparently had to use the gym to say mass because municipal authorities have refused them the necessary permits to build an actual church.
"On behalf of myself and the Muslim community in the country, I strongly urge the major of Tangerang and Lurah (village chief) to stop disrupting religious services in the St Bernadette compound. If my demands are not soon met, have no doubts that I shall bring the issue to court," Wahid was quoted as saying.
The former president also met the representatives of St Bernadette School, its priests and nuns and some parents to assure them of his support, AsiaNews said. Roughly eight percent of Indonesia’s over 234 million people are Christian, according to official estimates.
