India goes on alert as further city bombings feared

MAJOR INDIAN cities were on alert yesterday, anticipating further attacks after two successive days of serial bombings that ripped through a communally-sensitive western city and an information technology hub in the south, killing 51 people.

"The entire nation has been asked to step up security at vital installations", a federal home ministry spokesman said following bomb attacks at Ahemdabad in Gujarat state on Saturday evening and in the country's software capital, Bangalore, 24 hours earlier.

Police said 16 bombs exploded within one hour in the evening in Ahemdabad's teeming bazaars, congested neighbourhoods and hospitals tending to the injured in the affluent and Muslim-dominated city, killing 49 people, including women and children and wounding over 160 others.

Containing ammonium nitrate, gelatine sticks and ball-bearings, the bombs were strapped to bicycles and motorcycles, secreted inside lunch boxes and under seats in crowded public buses and detonated with timers at staggered intervals.

Ahemdabad police commissioner OP Mathur said an unexploded bomb had been found in the city and two others in the nearby diamond-cutting centre of Surat, and defused. Around 30 people, he said, had been detained for questioning but declined to elaborate.

The plan behind the meticulously planned bombings. federal home minister Shivraj Patil said. was to trigger communal strife between the majority Hindus and Muslims in the normally turbulent city. He appealed for calm.

The little-known "Indian Mujahideen" or Islamic warriors group claimed responsibility for the Ahmedabad attack in a lengthy e-mail to television news channels minutes before the first bomb exploded at about 6.30pm on Saturday. It declared the bombings were to avenge the month-long pogrom in 2002 in Gujarat in which over 2,500 people, mostly Muslims, were killed by rampaging Hindu mobs.

Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), one of India's most controversial politicians, was accused by human rights activists and MPs of connivance in the riots, for which the US has refused to issue him a visa.

The BJP was also in power in Bangalore, capital of Karnataka province, where eight bombs exploded in under an hour on Friday, killing two people and paralysing the hi-tech city that caters to multinational software companies and western financial institutions.

Earlier, "Indian Mujahideen" claimed responsibility for the serial bombings that killed 63 people in the western tourist city of Jaipur - also ruled by the BJP - in May and in northern Uttar Pradesh state last November in which 10 others died.

In a similar document sent minutes before the Jaipur bombings to TV channels, the "Indian Mujahideen" stated the attack was in retaliation to India supporting the US and Britain on "international issues" and warned that if this alliance continued, more strikes would follow.

Indian and western security officials, however, claimed the "Indian Mujahideen" was a "smokescreen" for Muslim militant groups based in neighbouring Bangladesh and Pakistan with the aim of fomenting sectarian tension in India. They said these groups had long been fighting India's control over the disputed Kashmir province, its recent regional and global economic status and its strategic and defence co-operation with the West, especially the US.

Federal Intelligence Bureau sources said the attacks demonstrated the capability of the foreign insurgent groups to strike "anywhere" and at "anytime" across India by using disaffected Muslims as "carriers". Some 13 per cent of India's population of more than 1.2 billion is Muslim.

In excess of 550 people have died in 11 well-co-ordinated terrorist attacks across India since October 2005. None of them had been solved so far and no arrests made.

The first round of Ahemdabad's bombings took place near busy markets, followed by explosions some 25 minutes later in and around two hospitals where the injured were being rushed.

A doctor, his three-month pregnant wife and another doctor were killed in explosions at two adjoining hospitals within a two-mile radius. "Never before have we seen such ruthless bombings of hospitals. The terrorists' objective was to strike the defenceless and deepen the fear," a senior security official said.

"I came with my two children to cheer up my mother admitted to hospital," said Pankaj Patel, whose son Rohan and daughter Pratha were killed at Ahmedadad hospital. They were laughing when the blast occurred.

Army troops patrolled Ahemdabad, and police and paramilitary personnel were deployed across the city to prevent the outbreak of any sectarian violence.

source : http://www.irishtimes.com/