An explosion hit a Roman Catholic cathedral in the eastern Indonesian city of Makassar on Sunday morning, breaking the quiet of Palm Sunday, a holy day for Christians.
The unverified video, allegedly made at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, showed smoking debris and palm leaves scattered on the floor.
Father Wilhelmus Tulak, a priest from the cathedral, told Metro TV, an Indonesian network, that a gas station attendant was burned while trying to stop a suicide bomber. Ten people were injured, said the priest.
The cathedral was in between masses when two motorcyclists approached, looking suspicious, Father Wilhelmus told Metro TV.
Mohammad Ramadhan Pomanto, the mayor of Makassar, a port city of about 1.5 million people on the island of Sulawesi, told Metro TV that body parts were found up to 200 meters away. He said that no churchgoers were killed.
Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority nation in the world, has a significant Christian minority. In recent years, Southeast Asian Islamic State affiliates have targeted Christian places of worship there and in the Philippines, mostly Catholics.
In 2018, three Christian churches were bombed in Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city, leaving a dozen passers-by dead. Suicide terrorists were a couple and their four children. Within days, members of two other families also detonated bombs in Surabaya, exploding.
Last year, a Roman Catholic cathedral was bombed for the third time on the island of Jolo, in the southern Philippines, killing at least 14 people. As with the attacks in Surabaya, a local Islamic State affiliate took responsibility for the attack. A 2019 suicide attack in the same cathedral, which killed more than 20 people, was perpetrated by an Indonesian couple.