AMBON, Indonesia (Reuters) - A home-made bomb killed three young women in the Indonesian city of Ambon in the strife-torn Moluccas islands on Thursday, police said.
Witnesses and officials said the bomb also wounded at least three people when it went off near a sports field used by the region's rival Muslim and Christian communities.
"Three people died of shrapnel wounds. All of them were women. All of them were young," said Lieutenant Victor Hattu from the Moluccas police.
Hattu and other officials said it was too early to say who was behind the attack.
Ambon, some 2,300 km east of Jakarta, is the major hub in the Moluccas islands, where a wave of clashes between Muslims and Christians has claimed more than 5,000 lives since early 1999.
Both sides signed a peace deal in February but tension remains high. In late July a bomb blast in Ambon wounded 53 people but police said they did not suspect it was motivated by religion.
The main architect of the Moluccas peace process, chief social welfare minister Jusuf Kalla, recently told Reuters he believed the worst of the violence was over but unidentified armed groups wanted to cause trouble.
However civil emergency status - one level down from martial law - is still in place in the once-scenic archipelago in the east of the world's most populous Muslim country.
Indonesia has been ravaged by violence in several parts of the sprawling archipelago since autocratic President Suharto stepped down amid chaos four years ago, allowing long-simmering tensions to come to the surface.
Last week, gunmen killed two Americans and an Indonesian near a gold and copper mine operated by PT Freeport Indonesia in the rebellious eastern province of Papua.
More than 85 percent of Indonesia's population follows Islam, but in some eastern areas there are roughly equal numbers of Christians and Muslims.