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Two bombs explode in Indonesia town

Source
Agence France Presse - April 14, 2007

Poso – Two homemade bombs exploded 15 minutes apart in this central Indonesia town that has been plagued by religious violence, police said Sunday. No one was hurt.

The first blast Saturday night was in an empty lot, followed by a second blast a little more than a mile away in front of a Christian residence, said local police chief Lt. Col. Adeni Muhan. Witnesses reported seeing two men on a motorcycle near the scene of the second blast, Muhan said.

Poso, a town in Central Sulawesi province about 1,000 miles northeast of Jakarta, was the center of fierce battles between Muslims and Christians that killed about 1,000 people in 2001 and 2002.

A peace agreement ended the worst of the violence, but tensions flared after the beheading of Christian school girls in 2005 and again in September 2006, after the execution of three Roman Catholic militants convicted in an attack on an Islamic school that killed at least 70 people.

Indonesia, the world's fourth largest nation, is secular although 90 percent of its 220 million people are Muslims. In Central Sulawesi and some parts of the country's east, Christian and Muslim populations are roughly equal.

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