A policeman was killed and 10 others were injured Wednesday when a suicide bomber blew himself up inside the compound of a police station on Indonesia's Java Island, police said.
Nine of the injured were policemen, with three of them seriously hurt, and a civilian, National Police Chief Listyo Sigit Prabowo told a press conference.
The blast occurred at 8.20am at the police station in the West Java provincial capital of Bandung during a morning assembly in the front yard after the man entered the station and pointed a knife at the officers, according to Bandung Police Chief Aswin Sipayung.
"While the officers were trying to avoid the attack, he ran into the lobby of the building and blew himself up," Sipayung said.
According to Listyo, the crime scene is still being investigated and police are hunting for members of Jamaah Ansharut Daulah, or JAD, a Muslim militant network linked to Islamic State, with which the suicide bomber was affiliated.
"From his fingerprints and through facial recognition technology, the perpetrator was identified as Agus Sujatno," he said.
Agus was jailed for four years in 2017 for his involvement in a bomb attack on a busy road in Bandung in the same year, Listyo added. The 34-year-old man, who assembled the bomb in the 2017 attack, was released last year.
In Indonesia, all former terrorist convicts, particularly hardliners such as Agus, are subject to police monitoring upon release. The police chief, however, did not say how he was able to launch an attack when under police monitoring.
Video footage and photographs circulating on social media showed the body of the suicide bomber lying on the floor and some damage to the building.
"Lone wolves," or individuals acting alone, have been a new phenomenon in recent years following the return of Islamic State militants to their respective countries of origin.
Such lone wolves, according to some experts on terrorism, started to emerge following the collapse of the centralised command structure of Jemaah Islamiyah, the Southeast Asian wing of al-Qaida, after the Bali bomb attacks in 2002 which claimed 202 lives.
Most of the less professional lone wolves come from cells from the old network, which continues to spread extremist ideology and recruit more followers in a decentralised pattern, the experts said.
Authorities in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority country, have paid serious attention to such extremists, as their attacks are almost impossible to predict and prevent.
