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Eight die in Indonesia religious unrest

JAKARTA: Indonesian police shot dead eight people on Saturday in the eastern spice islands where at least 300 have died in Christian-Muslim clashes in recent days, residents said.

They said the eight were killed around Masohi town on the remote island of Seram and Muslim boarding schools, houses and mosques were set ablaze overnight.

"According to witnesses the victims were shot dead by members of the mobile brigade police during the clashes between Christians and Muslims there," an official from a Al Fatah hospital told Reuters from the Moluccas capital Ambon, 2,300 km (1,400 miles) east of Jakarta.

An Ambon-based policeman denied the shooting, adding that the fighting on Seram had stopped Friday afternoon.

Phone links to the island were cut on Saturday.

The hospital official, who did not want to be identified, said the clashes broke out on Friday as local Christians retaliated against Muslims after the earlier destruction of a church in Ambon.

According to police, about 1,500 people have died this year in the violence in the Moluccas, at the eastern end of this multi-etnic nation. -Reuters