A family of five, including an eight-year-old child, mounted a suicide bombing at the Surabaya police headquarters yesterday, injuring 10 people at the scene.
The attack comes even as Indonesia is still reeling from the shock of coordinated suicide bombings at three churches by a separate family of six on Sunday morning that claimed 12 other lives in the country's second-largest city.
Closed-circuit television footage of the incident at the local police station showed the family of five riding two motorcycles towards a sentry officer before they blew themselves up.
Only the eight-year-old daughter from the group survived the blast.
National police chief Tito Karnavian said yesterday that the families were acting on instructions from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and the attacks were in retaliation for the arrest of Aman Abdurrahman, a radical cleric and leader of Jemaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), an ISIS-affiliated alliance of Indonesian militants.
Aman is on trial for masterminding a 2016 terror attack in central Jakarta that killed four bystanders. He is scheduled to appear in court on Friday.
General Tito said the perpetrators were also seeking revenge for the arrest of Zainal Ansori, the head of the East Java chapter of JAD, last year. "They received instructions from ISIS central command. As they are being squashed there, they issued instructions to cells around the world to move," he added.
The father from the family that struck the police station was from the same terror cell as the family of six that attacked the three churches on Sunday.
Videos and photographs by witnesses at the latest blast site showed a policeman lying injured on the ground, and smouldering body parts and debris.
Separately on Sunday night, a bomb exploded on the fifth floor of a block of flats in Sidoarjo, about 30km from Surabaya, killing three members of another family. Three of the family members survived and were taken to hospital.
The father is a confidant of the husband behind the church bombings, Gen Tito said. Police recovered several pipe bombs similar to those they found near the churches on Sunday.
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