Hundreds torch mosque in Indonesia

JAKARTA, Indonesia (CNN) -- Hundreds of people burned a mosque Monday in the West Java province of Indonesia, police said.

Around 300 people attacked the Al Furqon mosque about 1 a.m., damaging a nearby school, police said. The mosque belonged to the Ahmadiyah sect considered heretical by many in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation.

The attack happened after negotiations to remove a sign with the name of the sect, police said, and comes a week after religious scholars, government officials and prosecutors recommended the sect be outlawed for "deviating from Islamic principles," The Associated Press reported.

Many sect members had fled the area prior to the attack, AP said.

"We heard the attackers chanting 'burn, burn' and 'kill, kill,"' a sect member, Zaki Firdaus, told AP. "It was horrifying."

Firdaus said around 200 sect members had escaped the mosque before the attack. A sect spokesman, Syamsir Ali, told AP that efforts to ban Ahmadiyah beliefs had prompted an escalation of violence again adherents. E-mail to a friend

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