Jakarta – The Indonesian Navy said it had captured two boats illegally ferrying weapons to North Maluku. The vessels were heading to Ternate, the main town in the riot-torn province, eastern fleet the State Antara news agency quoted a spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel Ditya Sudarsono, as saying.

"The two ships were captured by the task force for the isolation of the Maluku and North Maluku waters," he said. However, Colonel Sudarsono said he had yet to receive information about the date the vessels were seized and the number weapons and people on board. He said only that the ships had come from Galela, in Northern Halmahera, one of the regions worst hit by sectarian violence that has swept the Malukus since January last year.

Last Thursday the navy said it had captured 17 boats trying to smuggle weapons into the Maluku islands, including one accompanied by a police officer. A total of 797 firearms, 550 knives and machetes, 2,348 bullets, 50 fuel bombs, 397 home-made bombs and a number of arrows were confiscated from the 17 boats. Detonators, blank rounds of ammunition, hand grenades and poison were also recovered.

Violence between Muslims and Christians in the Maluku islands has left more than 4,000 people dead in the past 18 months, with more than 100 people killed and hundreds wounded in Ambon, the capital of the Maluku islands, since June 21.

Meanwhile, a long-standing dispute between two villages in Slawi district, in Central Java, has left one man dead and more than 120 houses destroyed and burnt, police said. "One man died, another [was] injured after a group of men from Harjosari village confronted and assaulted six residents from the neighbouring Karang Malang village on Sunday night," Superintendent Wawan Ranuwijaya, who heads the Slawi district, police said.

Speaking from Slawi, some 145 kilometres west of the Central Java capital Semarang, Superintendent Ranuwijaya said the victim and five of his friends were attacked on Sunday night after watching a traditional shadow puppet play in Harjosari. "They were beaten up for no reasons, but it's nothing new, since both villages have been under a dispute for a long time," he said.

Following the attack, about 500 residents from the Karang Malang village retaliated early yesterday morning by attacking Harjosari. He said the attackers entered the village through a forest behind the village. "We had anticipated a retaliation, but they took an alternative route through the woods and razed the houses in Harjosari," the police chief said.

In Aceh, at the northern tip of Sumatra island, unidentified men yesterday attacked and burnt two oil tanks in the depot of a company controlled by former president Soeharto's youngest son, police said. There were no casualties in the pre-dawn grenade attack on PT Aromatic, a subsidiary of the Humpuss Group, in the village of Rancong in North Aceh district, local police spokesman, Senior Inspector Ahmad Mustafa Kamal, said.