Suspected rebels in Indonesia's easternmost province of Papua shot dead a New Zealander employed by an affiliate of U.S. gold and copper mining company Freeport McMoRan and Mining Industry on Monday, according to local police.

They said an armed group of eight men, believed to be members of the separatist Free Papua Movement, shot 57-year-old Graeme Thomas Weal, an employee of PT Freeport Indonesia, at around 2 p.m. local time in the Kuala Kencana area of Mimika Regency, where the company operates.

"The shooting came from the jungle (behind the Freeport office)," the regency's police chief Era Adhinata told reporters, adding that the suspected rebels also injured two Indonesian employees of the same local affiliate.

Over the past year, attacks by separatist rebels against Indonesian security forces have increased after a long period of relative calm in the province.

The western half of New Guinea was taken over by Indonesia from Dutch colonialists in 1963 and incorporated into the country after a 1969 U.N.-sanctioned plebiscite.

Since then, it has had a long-running separatist movement led by the Free Papua Movement, whose military wing is known as the West Papuan National Liberation Army.

The eastern half of the world's second-largest island forms the mainland of the independent nation of Papua New Guinea.

==Kyodo

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