World War II shell blast kills five in Indonesia village

A suspected World War II shell exploded beneath a stilt house in an Indonesian fishing village in Papua, killing five people, wounding nearly 20 and reducing nine homes to wreckage, police said.

The blast struck the restive eastern Papua region on Sunday afternoon and startled residents with a thunderous boom, a ball of flames and a thick column of smoke, according to footage broadcast by Kompas TV. Papua police said at least 19 people were treated for minor injuries, while three people were still recorded as missing and several body parts had yet to be identified.

Papua police spokesman Cahyo Sukarnito said the source of the explosion was strongly suspected to have been a bomb or mortar left over from World War II. The detonation happened under a house raised on stilts, a common structure in coastal communities, turning an ordinary village setting into a scene of mass casualty and destruction.

The deaths have put fresh attention on the long afterlife of wartime ordnance in Indonesia. The country was a major battle zone during World War II, when Japanese forces occupied what was then the Dutch East Indies and Allied forces fought to retake control. More than 80 years later, that legacy is still surfacing in deadly ways.

Indonesia has already seen another fatal munitions disaster this year. In West Java province, nine civilians were among 13 people killed in 2025 when Indonesian troops detonated rejected munitions in a pit, underscoring how dangerous explosives can remain long after they are fired, buried or abandoned.

Police said they would provide further updates once the search for victims and the investigation were completed. For families in the Papua village, the immediate toll was already severe: five dead, three missing, nine homes gone and a community left to reckon with a war that ended generations ago but still claimed lives on Sunday.