PALU, Indonesia (AP) – A bomb ripped through a crowded meat market in an Indonesian province that has been plagued by sectarian violence, killing six people today and wounding 45 others, witnesses and police said. Many of the victims were believed to be Christians.

The bomb went off in a slaughterhouse that also sold meat directly to the public in the town of Palu on Sulawesi island. It was packed with people buying pork for tonight’s New Year celebrations, said Brig. Gen. Oegroseno, the police chief of Central Sulawesi province.

“The explosion was so loud, I couldn’t hear for a couple of seconds,” said Tega, a resident who lived nearby and uses only one name, like many Indonesians. “I ran out of my house and saw bodies lying around.”

Television footage showed police carrying bloodied bodies into ambulances. One man, apparently unhurt, was holding his head in his hands and screaming.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono condemned the blast, and urged police to investigate whether it was linked to other attacks on Christians in the province earlier this year, said his spokesman Andi Mallerangang.

Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim nation, and most people practice a moderate form of the faith. But attacks against Christians have increased in recent years amid a global rise in Islamic radicalism.

Central Sulawesi was the scene of fierce battles between Muslims and Christians in 2001 and 2002 that killed about 1,000 people, and violence has flared anew in recent months.

In October, unidentified assailants beheaded three Christian high school girls in Poso, east of Palu. In May, two bombs in the Christian-dominated town of Tentena killed 20 people.

Police have questioned several suspects in those attacks, but have not formally brought charges against anyone.

Security officials and former militants told The Associated Press in recent interviews that terrorists linked to the Jemaah Islamiyah terror network were behind the renewed attacks on Christians on the island.

Jemaah Islamiyah, which has ties to al-Qaida, has been blamed for a series of bloody bombings in Indonesia since 2000, including two strikes on Bali that together killed 222 people, many of them foreigners.