MURDERED ON THE WAY TO SCHOOL

Three Indonesian Christian girls won't go to school ever again:

Three Christian teenage girls were beheaded in the latest attack against non-Muslims in the troubled Indonesian province of Central Sulawesi, police said.

The three high school students were found with their heads severed early on Saturday in the sectarian-divided town of Poso, said provincial police spokesman Rais Adam.

The girls were believed to have been murdered while they were walking to school, Mr Adam said.

He said two of the victims' heads were found near a police post while the third was discovered outside a local Christian church in Poso.

"We are still waiting for results from investigation in the field. We are still trying to determine whether this case is religiously-motivated or not," he said.

If I were a betting man...

Update: Reuters has more details:

Men in black clothes and masks beheaded three teenage Christian girls on Saturday in eastern Indonesia as they walked to school near the Muslim town of Poso, officials said.

National police spokesman Aryanto Budiharjo said up to six men in black clothes and masks attacked the students in Bukit Bambu village, on the eastern island of Sulawesi.

"The perpetrators wore black attire and veils and they used machetes to slash (the victims)," he told reporters in Jakarta.

The three headless bodies of the high school students, dressed in brown uniforms, were left at the site of the attack. Three heads were found at separate locations two hours later by residents.

Poso, 1,500 km (900 miles) northeast of the capital Jakarta, is in an area where Muslim-Christian clashes killed 2,000 people until a peace deal was agreed in 2001.

Although religious fighting has largely subsided, tension is still high in the region following bombings in the neighbouring Christian town of Tentena which killed 22 people in May.

It looks like the peace deal is well and truly done.

Update II: There's nothing much new to report but a Yahoo News item does add this:

Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim nation, but Central Sulawesi has a roughly equal number of Muslims and Christians. The province was the scene of a bloody sectarian war in 2001-2002 that killed around 1,000 people from both communities.

At the time, beheadings, burnings and other atrocities were common.

A government-mediated truce succeeded in ending the conflict in early 2002, but there have since been a series of bomb attacks and assassinations of Christians. These included a blast at a market in Poso, a predominantly Christian town, that killed 22 people in May.

Christian leaders have repeatedly accused authorities in Jakarta of not doing enough to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.

The Christian-Muslim conflict in Sulawesi was an extension of a wider sectarian war in the nearby Maluku archipelago in which up to 9,000 perished between 1999 and 2002.

Update III: In a tangentially related story:

Another girls' school has been torched in Afghanistan, which is battling insurgents loyal to the ousted fundamentalist Taliban regime that banned education for women, an official has said.

The primary school, 65 kilometres from Kabul in Logar province, was under renovation and the girls were studying in tents, provincial criminal investigation director Qudratullah Arabzai told AFP.

"The school, the tents, the chairs, generator and a vehicle were destroyed in the fire," Mr Arabzai said.

The building, torched late on Saturday, was the fourth to be burnt in the same district since the collapse of the hardline Taliban regime in late 2001, he said.

Four years after the Taliban were removed, school enrolment among girls remains among the lowest in the world, with less than 10 per cent of girls enrolled in secondary schools, according to a UN report this month.

It's pretty easy to figure the root cause for this.