At least 55 people were killed when fighting between Christians and Muslims in the ravaged eastern Indonesian island of Ambon raged into its third day yesterday, Antara news agency said. More than 100 people were injured, it said.
The latest violence erupted on Sunday in Ambon, the provincial capital of the Moluccas, the Spice Islands of old, after reports that a 14-year-old Muslim boy had been run over by a vehicle driven by a Christian.
"We still can hear shooting and explosions. The situation is tense. There is a blackout in a number of areas," a policeman said from Ambon, 2,300 km east of Jakarta.
The violence prompted some church leaders to press the government to allow a UN peacekeeping force in the island. "A UN peacekeeping force must be deployed immediately especially to Ambon city and surrounding areas, because the security forces have been unable to restore order," Mr Josef Marcus Pattiasina, Secretary General of Communion of Churches in Indonesia, said.
The communion is the official umbrella group for the Protestant churches in Indonesia.
A 28-year-old Japanese pearl company executive was shot in the stomach and left shoulder by a group of armed residents, a nurse at Ambon's Bhakti Rahayu hospital. The man is in stable condition following surgery.
Residents said that the renewed clashes were some of the fiercest violence yet in Ambon, which has been battered by almost a year of religious violence.
The clashes followed fighting between Christians and Muslims last week that killed 43 people on the island of Buru, west of Ambon.
Antara also said at least 100 people had been killed in similar violence on Halmahera island, also part of the Spice Islands, since the start of the Muslim fasting month early in December.
Once held up as a model of religious harmony in mostly Muslim Indonesia, Ambon erupted in sectarian violence in January at the end of the last Muslim fasting month.
Earlier this month, President Abdurrahman Wahid visited Ambon to plead for an end to the fighting. But his visit has been followed by repeated clashes in the region.
At least 800 people have died this year in Moluccas violence. Sporadic violence is also continuing in another major hotspot, the separatist province of Aceh in far north-west Indonesia, where the army said it had shot dead three rebels.
Col Syafnil Armen said the fighting broke out when a group of four Free Aceh guerrillas armed with AK-47s stopped a carload of soldiers in Ulee Rubek village, about 50 km from the city of Lhokseumawe, on Monday night. The fourth rebel escaped.
A resident in the provincial capital Banda Aceh said the Free Aceh Movement published a statement in the daily Serambi Indonesia vowing revenge for the killings.