Gunmen attack Indonesian church, seven hurt

During the Easter Church Service held on Sulawesi, an Indonesian Island, seven people have been wounded in a shooting.

According to the police, two gunmen in black burst into the church on a motorbike last Saturday night and sprayed the congregation with automatic weapons fire before escaping.

"The gunmen fired indiscriminately as the churchgoers were singing a hymn ... these are people who want to stoke up more trouble here," said Lt. Col. Agil Assegaf.

Those injured included a 4-year-old girl, her parents and the pastor, Sitepu said. None suffered life-threatening injuries.

The region has been wracked in recent years by religious violence that killed around 1,000 people. Despite a peace accord signed between leaders of the Muslim and Christian communites in 2001 and large-scale fighting ended two years ago, in the past three months several prominent Christians have been killed or injured by gunmen, the region remains a powder keg.

Hundreds of police have been sent to secure Poso, where tensions were high, Assegaf said. Poso is 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) northeast of Jakarta. Security forces have arrested five suspected Muslim militants, including an Arab man, in the those attacks.

"We are combing the area around the church," Sitepu said. "We still don't know who the perpetrators are."

Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim nation, but Central Sulawesi has roughly equal Muslim and Christian populations.

After the bombings in Bali nightclub two years ago, when international attention focused on radical groups operating within Indonesia. The Bali bombings were carried out by Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian militant network linked to al-Qaida, which has been blamed for numerous other attacks in the region.

Authorities had warned that militants might carry out attacks to disrupt the country's parliamentary elections, which went off peacefully last Monday.