Indonesian police said Tuesday that armed rebels had gunned down seven civilians when they opened fire on a gold mine in the eastern region of Papua.
Authorities said assailants fired shots at mining workers on Monday afternoon in the remote mountainous Yahukimo district.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack so far, but the police claimed The West Papua Liberation Army (TPNPB) separatist group led by Egianus Kogoya was behind the shootings.
“We will chase the perpetrators and we will take legal action against the separatists and Egianus Kogoya,” Faizal Ramadhani, head of Cartenz Peace Taskforce, a special group formed to go after the separatists in Papua, said in a statement Tuesday.
Ramadhani said a police deployment sent to retrieve the bodies and rescue survivors was fired on by the rebels on their arrival.
“As soon as we arrived at the location, our personnel were attacked and the gunfire lasted 1.5 hours,” he said.
Seven bodies have been retrieved from the location while 11 other people were rescued alive, the police said.
Most of the dead were migrants from the South Sulawesi region.
The rebels also burned down excavators, trucks, and the workers’ camp, police said.
A spokesman for TPNPB, the military wing of Papua’s main separatist group, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The group was responsible for the February 2023 kidnapping of a New Zealand pilot from the Papuan highlands.
Papua refers to the Indonesian region in the western half of New Guinea island, which is made up of six provinces.
The region has seen several deadly attacks linked to the insurgency in recent years.
In July last year, 10 were killed when a group of rebels attacked a truck full of civilians transporting goods.
In March 2022, eight telecommunications workers were shot dead while installing communications towers in Puncak district.