Surabaya, Indonesia (CNN)A spate of deadly, ISIS-inspired bombings that rocked Indonesia’s second-largest city in 24 hours were carried out by three families — including their young children — who targeted churches and the police, authorities said.
In the latest attack on Monday morning, one family brought its 8-year-old daughter to launch a suicide bombing on Surabaya’s police headquarters, according to police.
The girl, who was with two other attackers on a motorcycle, was thrown clear and survived, police spokesman Frans Barung Mangera said. Four perpetrators died in the attack, which injured four police officers and six civilians.
A video of the scene showed the girl staggering through the rubble before a bystander picked her up and carried her to safety.
The bombing came one day after a family of six, including four children, detonated explosives atthree churches, killing 12 people and injuring at least 40.
The father, identified by police as Dita Oepriarto, was said to have driven his wife Puji Kuswat and their two daughters, aged 9 and 12, to the Indonesian Christian Church. The trio went inside and detonated a bomb.
An old family photograph of Puji Kuswati and her children, who carried out suicide bombings in Surabaya on Sunday.
Oepriarto then drove the van to the Pentecostal Central Church, where, from inside the vehicle, he detonated another bomb, police said.
Around the same time the couple’s two teenage sons, aged 16 and 18, drove motorcycles to the Santa Maria Catholic Church, where they also detonated bombs. All members of the family died in the attacks, which ISIS claimed responsibility for via its Amaq News Agency in what it called “a martyrdom operation.”
Later Sunday, in what police also described as a terror incident, a mother and her 17-year-old daughter were killed in the Surabaya suburb of Sidoarjo when a bomb handled by the family’s father detonated prematurely. Police found the father of the family in a house holding a detonator and shot him, police spokesman Barung Mangera said.
The family’s 12-year-old son took his two younger sisters to the Bhayangkara Police Hospital, he added.
A damaged motorcycle is seen outside the Surabaya Centre Pentecostal Church in Surabaya on May 14.
Tito Karnavian, Indonesia’s top-ranking police officer, told reporters Monday that police were working on the assumption that the attacks followed a directive from ISIS Central Command to avenge the imprisonment of the former leaders of Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), an Indonesian jihadi group that supports ISIS.
Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, has struggled in recent months with a rise in Islamist militancy, which has come as ISIS has been squeezed out of its heartland in Syria and Iraq.
Karnavian also told reporters Monday that none of the families involved in the attacks had recently traveled to Syria, but Oepriarto had close links with someone who had recently returned from Syria who may have inspired him to carry out the attacks.
“These attacks are the nightmare scenario that’s been anticipated since Indonesians affiliated with ISIS have returned from the Middle East,” said Greg Barton, Chair in Global Islamic Politics at Deakin University in Australia.