JAKARTA — Indonesian police on Monday said it found a home-made bomb in Ambon, a city with a history of major sectarian violence, a day after a suicide bomber attacked a packed church in Central Java province.
National police spokesman Anton Bachrul Alam told reporters that the bomb was found near a church in Ambon, and is investigating any link to Sunday's suicide attack in Solo town of Central Java.
The Solo bombing, which wounded 27 people, was the latest in a spate of attacks on minority religious groups in the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation.
Police has so far questioned 15 witnesses over the attack, the spokesman added.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said Sunday the bomber was part of a network based in Cirebon, 300 kilometres east of Jakarta, where in April a suicide bomber attacked a police mosque, killing only himself and wounding 30 with a bomb of nails, nuts and bolts.
Authorities say they suspect the Solo bomber was a 23-year-old involved in the April attack, who sat through the Sunday church service, and later stood up and detonated a bomb strapped to his stomach.
But a DNA test is yet to confirm the identity of the bomber.
Most of Indonesia's 200 million Muslims are moderates, but the country has struggled to deal with numerous attacks by radical extremists, like the Al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) which carried out the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people.
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