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Fire Breaks Out In Aceh ExxonMobil Gas Fields
JAKARTA, April 7 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A mysterious pre-dawn fire burned a gas pipeline Saturday in vital natural gas fields in Indonesia's Aceh province, which have been closed for a month due to security threats.
The fire raged as 1,000 fresh policemen were reported to have arrived in the provincial capital Banda Aceh.
Local journalists said the fire broke out at 1:00 am at a gas pipeline in Cluster IV in Matang Kuli subdistrict housing the shutdown ExxonMobil natural gas facilities in North Aceh, with no reports of injuries.
It was unclear whether the fire was accidental or the result of an attack, the journalists told AFP by phone, adding that government troops guarding the area had refused to allow them on the scene.
The troops said the fire had burned for two hours and destroyed one pipe before being doused.
The North Aceh spokesman for the separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM) - blamed by the military for the attacks on ExxonMobil facilities which forced its closure on March 9th - cited GAM intelligence reports as saying the military guarding the complex had been burning tires there at the time.
"The incident happened while the military were in the compound burning tires. One tire was near the pipeline and it burned," Daud told AFP.
He said he believed the fire was a part of a military strategy to "push the government to declare Aceh a military operational area."
"It would have been impossible for GAM to have set the fire, there were so many military around," Daud said.
Police and military spokesmen refused comment on the blaze.
CNN, however, reports that separatists at a gas field in Lhoksukon threw a grenade, about 1,750 kilometers (1,100 miles) northwest of Jakarta, just after 12:00am Friday night/Saturday morning.
The Jakarta Post meanwhile said the 1,000 fresh mobile brigade police had arrived aboard two navy ships on Thursday and reached the provincial capital of Banda Aceh by Friday to replace troops at the end of their six-month posting.
According to military figures, some 30,000 police and troops are deployed in Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra island, where the GAM has been fighting for an independent state since the mid-1970s.
The Post meanwhile quoted U.S. Ambassador Robert Gelbard as saying in Banda Aceh that he had appealed to the GAM to allow the reopening of ExxonMobil natural gas fields, whose closure is costing Jakarta some $100 million in lost export revenues.
ExxonMobil shut down three of its five fields in North Aceh on March 9th citing GAM threats to its personnel, after months in which company buses were hijacked, facilities torched and the company plane shot at.
"I have met with GAM representatives and asked them to stop those kinds of threats," the Post quoted Gelbard as saying at the end of a brief visit to the province on Friday.
GAM spokesmen have blamed the most recent incidents of violence around the closed Arun gas fields on the Indonesian military, including the shooting of a helicopter carrying the country's mining minister last month.
The military, GAM spokesman Abu Sofyan Daud said, had secured a wide perimeter around the gas facilities, making it impossible for the GAM to approach the area.
Sources in Aceh have suggested that the core of the problem was money, demanded by both GAM and the army to protect the facilities.
Natural gas from ExxonMobil's fields in Arun is the feedstock for 10 shipments a month of liquefied natural gas (LNG) for South Korean and Japanese customers.
The siphoning off by Jakarta of Aceh's rich hydrocarbon and timber resources has long been a source of resentment in the province, where the drive for a referendum on self-determination has gained momentum since the fall of former Indonesian dictator Suharto in 1998.
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