Surabaya, Indonesia. A running gun battle claimed six lives, as Indonesian police fought with suspected Islamic terrorists today.
The Indonesian Police shot dead six suspected members of an Islamic militant group in Indonesia on Saturday, after a failed drive-by shooting targeting police officers in East Java. Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population and has been on high alert over a recent resurgence in radicalism inspired by ISIS activity in the region.
After a police chase the six abandoned their vehicle in a village in the Tuban area, not far from the industrial city of Surabaya, and attempted to flee into a plantation where they were all killed in a second gun battle with police, East Java Police spokesman Frans Barung Mangera reported.
Police were monitoring the vehicle prior to the attack, he said, in connection with the Friday arrest of three suspected members of the group, Jemaah Anshorut Daulah (JAD), who were allegedly planning an attack on a police station and had bought M16 machine guns from the southern Philippines.
“We tried to stop that vehicle, but the vehicle did not stop,” Mangera stated, adding that those in the vehicle “took out weapons and shot at officers.”
The Indonesia law enforcement community has had some major successes fighting terrorism inspired by Al Qaeda’s attacks on the United States in 2001. But there has been a resurgence of Islamist activity in recent years, some of it linked to the rise of Islamic State.