Newsnomics AJAY ANGELINA reporter | A suspected man blew himself up on Wednesday at Astana Anyar police station at Indonesia’s main island of Java, killing an officer and injuring seven people, as official said, in what appeared to be the latest in a string of suicide attacks blamed on Muslim militants.

The attacker entered the Astana Anyar police station with a motorcycle and detonated explosives as police werelining up for a morning assembly, said Bandung city police chief Aswin Sipayung.

West Java Police spokesperson Ibrahim Tompo said the man was entering the station when he detonated his explosive, instantly killing himself and an officer. He said six other officers and a civilian were rushed to a nearby hospital with injuries.

West Java Police Chief Suntana said the man brought two bombs but one apparently failed to explode and was defused.

Suntana, who goes by a single name, said that police found a paper taped to the perpetrator’s motorbike with the words, “Criminal code is the law of infidels, let’s fight the satanic law enforcers.”

On Tuesday, an Indonesian parliament passed a new criminal code that bans sex outside of marriage and insulting the president and state institutions

Indonesia has battled militants since bombings on the resort island of Bali in 2002 killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists.

In May 2018, two families carried out a series of suicide bombings on churches in the city of Surabaya, killing a dozen people including two young girls whose parents had involved them in one of the attacks. 

A similar attack occurred in 2019, when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a busy police station in Medan, Indonesia’s third-largest city, wounding at least six people.

Last year, two attackers believed to be members of a militant network attacked on Roman Catholic Cathedral during a Palm Sunday mass at Sulawesi Island, killed the two and wounded at least 20.