Jakarta, Indonesia - An unidentified gunman shot and killed a Christian priest in the restive eastern Indonesian province of Central Sulawesi on Monday morning, the state-run Antara news agency reported.
Irianto Kongkoli was shot in the head at about 8:15 a.m. while he was buying house materials at a local shop in Palu, the provincial capital of Central Sulawesi.
'He (Kongkoli) suddenly fell to the ground after a gunshot was heard,' Antara quoted a witness as saying.
Another report by the Detik.com online news portal said the priest was dead on the spot.
Central Sulawesi police were investigating the killing, which had triggered fresh tension in the province, the reports said.
On Saturday evening, a home-made bomb exploded outside a district office building in Poso, about 120 kilometres from Palu, but no one was injured in the blast.
Tension in Central Sulawesi has been high in the period leading up to and after the September 22 execution of three Christian men who were accused of masterminding an attack by militia gangs that killed at least 70 people in an Islamic boarding school in Poso in 2000.
Poso, about 1,600 kilometres northeast of Jakarta, and nearby regions had been wracked by communal fighting between Muslims and Christians from 1999 until 2001, killing more than 1,000 people from both sides.
In early 2001, a government-sponsored peace accord was signed by rival party leaders aimed at ending the conflict, but tensions remain and violence still frequently occurs in the area.
Although the vast majority of Indonesia's 220 million residents are Muslim, a large percentage of central Sulawesi's population is Christian.