Family detonates bomb at Indonesia police site

JAKARTA, Indonesia — A wave of deadly bombings Sunday and Monday and evidence of more planned have shaken Indonesia just before the holy month of Ramadan, with entire families — including children — carrying out suicide attacks against Christian worshippers and the police.

The discovery Monday of a trove of completed bombs in a housing complex outside Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city, came a day after members of a single family carried out three attacks against separate churches in the city around Mass time, killing seven people.

On Sunday night, three members of another family, including a child, were killed when a bomb exploded at their apartment outside Surabaya when the police moved in to arrest them.

And on Monday morning, a family of five riding on two motorbikes detonated a bomb at the entrance of the Surabaya police headquarters — killing all but one of them and injuring four police officers. An 8-year-old girl who was with the attackers survived the blast and was taken to the hospital.

The extent of the carnage and the fact that children were enlisted in the attacks drew condemnation from the country’s leader, President Joko Widodo, who called them “barbaric.” All told, 12 civilians and 13 terrorist suspects were dead from two days of violence, with at least 46 people injured, including police officers.

Police officials said the attackers, whether by blood or other ties, were working together.

“They’re from one organization,” Gen. Tito Karnavian, chief of the National Police, said during a Monday news conference in Surabaya. The city, the capital of East Java province with a population of almost 3 million, has a large ethnic Chinese Christian community.

A day earlier, Karnavian had said the family suspected in those attacks had recently returned to Indonesia after being deported from Syria, but police retracted that statement.

On Monday, Karnavian said the bombs that exploded Sunday and Monday were similar in their construction — highly powerful and sensitive to movement — to those used by the Islamic State group in its war in Iraq and Syria.

The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attacks, describing each of the bombings as a “martyrdom” operation carried out by three modes of attack: a car bomb, a suicide vest and a motorcycle-borne bomb.

During Sunday morning’s attacks, one suicide bomber appeared to have been disguised as a churchgoer. In another, an attacker drove a Toyota minivan with a bomb to the site. Still another attacker was seen in footage speeding on a scooter toward a church before an explosion.

In Sidoarjo, a suburb south of Surabaya, a bomb detonated in a family’s apartment as the police closed in Sunday night, killing the husband and wife and one of their children, and injuring three other children, said a spokesman for the provincial police, Frans Barung Mangera. He identified the dead suspect as Anton Ferdiantono, 46, who police officials later said was a friend of the man behind the church bombings.

In the final burst of violence Monday, four of the five people on the motorcycles were killed, and the fifth, the 8-year-old girl, was taken to the hospital, said Mangera, the police spokesman. Four police officers were reported injured. A video released by an Indonesian news outlet appeared to show the explosion centered on one of the motorcycles, flattening police officers and damaging another car.

Counterterrorism police said they raided another housing complex in Sidoarjo on Monday morning, recovering several completed bombs after having neighboring residents evacuate.

The family members in the church bombings have been identified as Dita Oepriarto and his wife, Puji Kuswati. Police initially gave his name as Dita Futrianto but corrected that based on his national identity card. Two of their sons, ages 18 and 16, were also involved, as well as two daughters, ages 9 and 12, according to police.

The police later disabled three bombs at the family’s home.

Oepriarto, they said, was the leader of the Surabaya cell of Jemaah Anshorut Daulah, an Indonesian network of extremist groups that is affiliated with the Islamic State.

According to police, Oepriarto was also friends with the family that carried out Monday’s police headquarters bombing.

Dendri Oemiarti, Oepriarto’s younger sister, was wracked with grief when she spoke to The Associated Press on Monday and said her elderly parents were in a state of shock.

“What he has done has hurt us so deeply,” she said as tears flowed down her cheeks.

“What thoughts have influenced him? I do not understand. I do not know what changed my good brother to be so sadistic.”