Banda Aceh – At least four civilians, including a five-year-old child, were killed and three others seriously injured in the latest violence in the restive Indonesian province of Aceh, police and residents said Sunday.
The five-year-boy and a man were killed by stray bullets during a shootout between rebel separatists and Indonesian security forces following a landmine explosion in the Pidie district on Saturday, Pidie police chief Heru Budi Ersanto said.
The police truck hit the landmine while on the main state highway between Beureuneun and Tiro in Pidie district on Saturday, but there were no casualties, Assistant Superintendent Ersanto said.
Troops dispatched to the area to look for the assailants came across a group of rebels and a shootout ensued in which the two victims were killed and three others were seriously injured.
All the victims had been working in a field near the shootout or were passing by when they were shot, residents said. The injured were rushed to the general hospital in Banda Aceh.
Ersanto said that the troops were attacked first, while local rebel spokesman Abu Razak claimed that a group of rebels on motorcycles inadvertently ran into the soldiers. No rebels or troops were killed in the shoot out. Four civilians were later arrested over the landmine.
"They are only detained for questioning and if they turn out not to be linked [to the landmine] we will return them to their families," Ersanto said.
Meanwhile, in the North Aceh district, two civilians, including a member of the Aceh Merdeka (GAM) separatist movement, were shot dead by security forces in two separate incidents on Saturday.
One man was shot in Madan village, in the Samudra Geudong sub-district while another was shot dead in Buloh Blang Ara in the Kuta Makmur district, Aceh police spokesman, Superintendant Yatim Suyatmo said.
In Buloh Blang Ara, a police patrol shot the rider of a motorcycle during a roadchek. "When he [the motorcycle rider] was stopped, the victim resisted and a fist fight broke out with Corporal Unang. But then Kadir [the victim] pulled a handgrenade out of his trousers and the the personnel shot him and he was hit in the chest" Suyatmo said. The victim died on the spot, he added.
But Amni bin Ahmad Marzuki, the spokesman of the joint committee for security modalities, one of the two committees set up to oversee an extended three month truce between the rebel and government forces, said the victim was a motorcycle taxi driver.
At the road check, the driver's license and motorcycle documents were confiscated and the driver told to return to after dropping his passenger, Amni said. But he was tortured for some 30 minutes, before taken to the back of the military station there and executed, said Amni, a GAM representative on the committee.
On the incident in Madan village, Suyatmo said that the victim was shot as he tried to run away when he met a police patrol there. Warning shots were fired in the air, but as the shots went unheeded, "the security personnel were forced to shoot the victim," he said. The GAM deputy commander for the area, Sofyan Daud told AFP that the victim was a GAM member but that he was shot while he was having coffee at a roadside stall.
In another incident, the empty office of the public prosecutor in Bireun in East Aceh was early on Saturday torched by unknown men, residents there said.
GAM has waged a guerrilla war for more than 20 years for an independent state of Aceh, a resource-rich region on the northern tip of Sumatra island.
Military brutality during a nine-year long government operation that ended in 1998, and the perceived exploitation of Aceh's oil and gas reserves by Jakarta has fed the separatist sentiment.
Jakarta and the rebels in mid-September agreed to prolong a truce by another three months. But it has so far failed to reduce violence.