INDONESIA. DEATH SENTENCE FOR TERROR SUSPECT

Indonesian national Assep Djaja was sentenced to death for killing eight people in attacks in the Moluccas islands that sparked fears of sectarian bloodshed in the region.
The court in the islands' main city of Ambon said that Assep and his accomplices had carried out what it said were terrorist attacks in two villages in the islands in 2004 and in 2005. Four policemen guarding a Christian enclave surrounded by Muslim villages were killed in the 2005 attack. "What the defendant had done was sadistic and inhumane," Antara national agency quoted the court as saying in its ruling. The Moluccas islands, 2300 km east of Jakarta, was the scene of vicious communal fighting between Muslims and Christians from 1999 to 2002 which left more than 5000 dead. The conflict also drew Muslim militants from groups such as the al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiah, a South-East Asian network blamed for numerous bomb attacks across Indonesia.