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Irianese separatists attack timber company, two dead

Source
Agence France Presse - December 9, 2000

Jayapura – Two lumberjacks were killed and two critically injured in an attack on a timber company base camp Saturday in the troubled Indonesian province of Irian Jaya, rights groups said here.

The attack, which military sources said was believed to be the second hit-and-run attack this week by Papuan separatist rebels, took place one kilometer inside the Indonesian side of the border with Papua New Guinea.

A human rights worker who visited the victims of the mid-morning assault in Jayapura general hospital quoted one of the wounded men as saying many more wounded had fled into the jungle. "All the victims suffered arrow, spear and axe wounds," Christian Torrey, a monitor for the Institute for Human Rights and Advocacy (Elsham), said.

Earlier reports by the state Antara news agency had said only one person had died in the attack, in the Skouw area about 75 kilometers from the provincial capital of Jayapura.

In the first attack this week, on Thursday, the separatists hit a market place and police station on the outskirts of Jayapura, killing two policemen, one whose head was split with an axe, and a Papuan security guard.

In the aftermath of the attack police rounded up 99 people for questioning, but the province police chief said Saturday all but three had been released. "We've released them all, only three remain," Brigadier General Sylvanus Wenas told an AFP reporter in Jayapura.

Wenas declined to comment on the identities of those detained after Thursday's bloody pre-dawn attack on the Apebura police post, 15 kilometers from the center of Jayapura.

But Papuan students and staff of Elsham told AFP most of those held were students dragged from their hostels near the police station on Thursday morning. At least four of those detained died at the hands of police, including two reportedly beaten to death.

Abepura residents had said that as the attackers, who were armed with bows and arrows and machetes, fled into the hills behind Abepura, they could be heard yelling to pursuing police that they were returning to the hostels.

Autopsies were carried out at the Jayapura state hospital Friday night on the bodies of three of the four detainees who died. Elsham advocacy coordinator Albert Rumbekwan told AFP all three had been identified as students, two aged 22 and one aged 17. Two had been beaten to death and one had a bullet wound to the chest, Rumbekwan said.

Wenas said students and residents had said earlier that Thursday's attack had been carried out by "Satgas Kotega" – pro-independence civilian guards from the highland Dani tribe.

Jakarta poured more than 1,000 fresh troops into Irian Jaya, which makes up half of the island of New Guinea, ahead of the December 1 anniversary of an unrecognized declaration of independence by Papuans.

Hard-line OPM members vowed to step up their attacks when on December 2 at least seven people were killed when independence supporters ran amok in the coastal town of Merauke in a dispute over the Morning Star flag there.

Irian Jaya, a former Dutch colony, is home to a native Melanesian population of 1.8 million people, most of them Christians, plus another 700,000 settlers from other parts of Indonesia.

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