At least six people, two of them policemen, were killed in a attack on a police station and a market in the remote Indonesian province of Irian Jaya on Thursday.
Police, who retaliated with violent raids on student hostels, said the attack was the work of militants who want the mountainous, jungle-clad province to become an independent state called West Papua.
Police and traders at the Abepura market on the outskirts of the capital Jayapura were attacked at 2:00 am (1700 GMT Wednesday) with primitive spears, arrows, axes and Molotov coktails, police and witnesses told AFP.
"One policeman was killed by an arrrow and the other in an axe attack," Jayapura police chief Lieutenant Colonel Daud Sihombing told AFP.
Hospital sources said a Papuan security guard died after being speared in the head. Four policemen and several residents were injured, according to local people.
Sihombing said one of the policemen killed was from the crack anti-riot Brimob (mobile police brigade).
Three of the attackers died at the hand of police he said, one of them during the attack, and two during the search for them. Police were late Thursday holding 86 people in custody in connection with the incident.
Provincial police chief Brigadier General Sylvanus Wenas blamed pro-independence civilian guards known as the Papuan Taskforce for the attack.
Sampe said the leaders of the attack had been identified as university students from the central highlands town of Wamena who were boarding in an off-campus hostel in Abepura.
"They are terrorists. They are extremely anarchistic. We declare war on them," Sampe said.
Immediately after the attack police launched raids on student hostels in the area and began arresting them.
"They started beating them up with rifle butts, pointing guns at them, firing at the ground, and went inside and woke up others who were sleeping and took away 35," Elda, a 16-year old girl student at one of the hostels told AFP.
She and other students said the attackers had run to the hostels from the scene of the attack and shouted at the students to join them but that the students had refused.
The police had followed the fleeing attackers to the hostels, but the attackers themselves melted into the night, the students said.
During the attack on the marketplace, scores of non-Papuans sheltered with police, while crowds of Papuans milled around. Riot officers patrolled the area in force.
The Abepura market was the scene of clashes on November 14 after local Papuans attacked Sulawesi traders, injuring three settlers.
At least 25 settlers were killed in Wamena, 250 kilometers (156 miles) southwest of here, on October 6 by pro-independence Papuan tribesmen, who ran riot after police pulled down the Morning Star flag and shot dead six independence supporters.
But a Papuan civil servant, who identified himself as Rudy, said Thursday's attack was unprecedented, though clashes between settlers and Papuans were common.
"An attack like this against police, against security forces, has never happened in the Jayapura area."
"What we are all concerned about now is more ethnic clashes happening."
Tensions have escalated since police enforced a ban on the separatist flag on December 2, the day after the anniversary of an unrecognized declaration of an independent Papuan state in 1961.
Hardline separatists have vowed to attack Indonesian security forces and any settlers seen to be aiding the troops.
Irian Jaya is home to a native Melanesian population of 1.8 million people, most of them Christians, plus another 700,000 settlers from other parts of Indonesia -- JAYAPURA, Indonesia (AFP)
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