Four dead in police clash with sect in Indonesia

JAKARTA, Oct 26 (Reuters) – A clash between police and machete-wielding members of a shadowy Islamic sect on Indonesia’s eastern Sulawesi island has killed four people, three of them officers, a senior policeman said on Wednesday.

The fighting a day earlier on the rugged hills just outside the Central Sulawesi provincial capital of Palu broke out when police sought to apprehend the leader of a tiny sect which has been branded deviant by local Muslim clerics.

“His supporters became hysterical and started to attack officers when police were about to take him. The three (police) victims were at the closest position to the mob,” said deputy national police spokesman Soenarko Artanto, adding one sect member also died in the fightings.

Local media reported the armed police had to shoot at the sect members who attacked the officers with lethal traditional weapons like machetes and poisonous blow darts.

The sect leader had been taken by the police for questioning while two policemen were still unaccounted for, Soenarko added.

On Wednesday, more than 300 police officers had been deployed to guard the sect’s remote hamlet.

Local mainstream clerics in Palu, which is 1,650 km (1,030 miles) east of Jakarta, said that although the sect considered itself Islamic, the followers mixed the religion with ancient local traditions and refused to observe basic Islamic tenets such as fasting during Ramadan or praying five times a day.

Muslims all over the world are observing the holy Ramadan month, which will end in early November.

Indonesia’s Religious Affairs minister Maftuh Basyuni called the sect, whose followers always wear white headbands and yellow scarves, “a very, very deviant group”.

Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim nation, but groups branded as deviant periodically spring up.

Last month, hundreds of angry Muslims in West Java province torched more than 30 houses and damaged mosques belonging to a breakaway Muslim sect connected to the Ahmadiyah movement.

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