Jakarta – Six Christians have been killed, and more are feared dead, in attacks by unidentified armed men on three villages in Indonesia's Central Sulawesi province, police said on Sunday.

The attacks, near the town of Poso some 1,000 miles northeast of Jakarta on Saturday night, come a day after the killing of two Christians and the burning of a church and about 30 houses in another village by gunmen, according to police.

The latest attacks on mostly Christian villages near Poso have raised fears of a resurgence of religious violence in the region where some 2,000 people have died in clashes since 1999.

About 85 percent of Indonesia's 210 million people are Muslim. The rest are mostly Christian, Hindu and animist.

The attacks have come after months of relative calm in Sulawesi. The area was wracked by violence in 2001 and 2002 and became a training ground for many Muslim militants.

"There were six people killed and nine injured in three villages...all of them Christians," Rudy Tranggono, deputy Poso police chief, told Reuters. Police earlier said four villages were attacked. "There was no damage to houses or churches in the villages," Tranggono said, adding that the identity of the attackers was not known.

But an official at Poso District Hospital, Sugianto Kaimudin, said he had received at least 14 injured people from the attacks on Saturday. He said three of the dead were brought to his hospital. One had been shot and two were hacked to death with machetes.

Wayan Miscaya, a nurse in the emergency department, said he was told by villagers that a total of eight people had been killed in the attacks.