Jakarta - Aid workers in Indonesia's ravaged Moluccas said yesterday they were burying hundreds of charred and rotting Muslim corpses from recent attacks by Christians.
Workers from a local Muslim aid group in Halmahera island, in the north of the Moluccan spice islands, said they had found hundreds of putrefying bodies, many burnt in mosques in three neighbouring villages. They said they were coming under attack as they spoke.
"It is very difficult to count the bodies . . . (They) were torched and burned by unidentified people," said Mr Mursal Amal Tomagola of the Medical Emergency aid group. The killings are the latest in a year of clashes in the once-idyllic spice islands. The exact death toll since the bloodshed erupted is not known, but analysts say the victims are evenly divided between Christians and Muslims. Along with mosques, churches have also been destroyed.
The Christian Indonesian Communion of Churches said dark forces were inciting the violence for their own political ends, hiding behind religion. "This conflict is nothing but the worst and the lowest side of human nature," the communion said in a statement in Jakarta.