A two-year-old girl has died after suffering 75% burns following an attack by an alleged Islamic extremist on a church in Borneo, Indonesia, reports ABC News. Ade Intan Marbun was one of four young children injured after a man – apparently identified by police as a 32 year old ex-convict for terrorism – threw a Molotov cocktail from his passing motorbike into Oikumene Church in Samarinda, the provincial capital of E. Kalimantan province. The suspect is said to have moved from Bogor City (60 km south of the Indonesian capital Jakarta) last year after he left prison.
It was the second explosion at a church in Indonesia this year. In August a would-be suicide bomber failed to detonate a bomb during Sunday Mass at a church in Medan in N. Sumatra, but managed to injure a priest with an axe before being restrained.
Islamic extremists were behind a series of attacks that destroyed churches in the Aceh region of Sumatra in 2015. Because of alleged discrimination by local authorities, some of the churches have not been rebuilt one year on.
In April 2010, Bogor’s Taman Yasmin Indonesia Christian Church (GKI Yasmin) was sealed and padlocked by order of the mayor of Bogor and the city government. In Dec 2010, the Indonesian Supreme Court had affirmed the church’s right to freedom of worship; however the mayor refused to reopen the church. The Indonesian Ombudsman’s Office also urged the Bogor city administration to withdraw its later 2011 decree annulling the church’s construction permit. In 2015, a report said the President can enforce the Supreme Court’s order on Bogor, but 2yrs in (Nov 2016), Widodo still appears to have not acted. The same report said, “[Widodo] has sought to “outsource a solution to Indonesia’s religious intolerance problem to NU and Muhammadiyah, [Indonesia’s two largest Muslim organizations]…While they both promote tolerant versions of Islam, the report said “some of the growth of extremism, which has many facets, can be dealt with only with the power of the state”.