BBC

40 killed in Indian train blasts; PM Singh calls for calm
By :
Date : 12 July 2006 0113 hrs (SST)
URL : AFP

MUMBAI : Seven explosions ripped through commuter trains during evening rush hour in India's financial capital Mumbai on Tuesday, killing 140 people in an attack the prime minister blamed on terrorists.

Train cars packed with commuters were blown apart, and television images showed ghastly footage of bloodied limbs and dead bodies in the wreckage after one of the worst such attacks in India in recent years.

A.P. Sinha, a senior state official for Maharashtra, told AFP that 140 people had been killed in the attacks in Mumbai, a sprawling city of almost 18 million people and the state's capital.

Suspicion immediately fell on Islamists who have been fighting Indian rule in the disputed Kashmir, part of which is held by Pakistan, where eight tourists were earlier killed in a series of grenade attacks.

"Obviously a terrorist outfit is behind the blasts because a normal human being could not have done this," said Mumbai police commissioner A.N. Roy.

Neighbouring Pakistan condemned what it called a "despicable act of terrorism."

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called for calm after an emergency meeting at his official residence.

"We will work to defeat the evil designs of terrorists and will not allow them to succeed," he said in a statement. "The government will take all possible measures to maintain law and order and defeat the forces of terrorism."

Indian authorities sounded a high alert across the capital New Delhi, at trains and bus stands across Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, as well as in Kashmir, where an Islamic insurgency has been raging for 16 years.

The apparently coordinated blasts occurred at packed railway stations or on trains in the Matunga, Khar, Mahim, Jogeshwari, Borivali and Bhayendar localities in and around Mumbai, he said. A seventh hit a subway.

Maharashtra state's chief minister said at least 300 people were wounded in the blasts, which took place within around 20 minutes of each other.

"The blast was so powerful that we thought we were hit by lightning. It shook our market," said shopkeeper Gopi Chand, who witnessed the blast in Khar.

Television footage showed dazed commuters with blood dripping from gaping injuries being carried by fellow travellers to waiting ambulances near Mahim station. Others frantically tried to call their relatives on mobile telephones.

One young man sat in a metro station with blood streaming down his face. Another young man buried his face weeping into a white handkerchief. People who were unhurt scrambled off trains and streamed down the tracks to safety.

"People began jumping off our running train when a bomb went off and filled the carriage with smoke and fire," said a commuter with serious injuries to his left arm and shoulder.

The injured were helped out of the mangled compartments, many of which were turned into piles of twisted metal.

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Jul, 11, 2006

NEW DELHI: The terror attack on Mumbai trains was carried out by Lashkar-e-Toiba and local Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) activists and was designed to trigger communal conflagration in the country’s financial capital, intelligence sources said.

While still waiting for clues to emerge, top intelligence sources in New Delhi seem pretty sure the blasts on the trains were plotted by Lashkar modules which are increasingly collaborating with activists of SIMI, which boasts of strong pockets of influence across Maharashtra.

The estimate of intelligence agencies here is derived from the scale of the attack, as well as precise information about the Lashkar’s sleeper cells that have proliferated in Maharashtra.

Sources in the home ministry, in fact, said that a carnage had seemed very much on the cards with information pouring in about stockpiling of arms and explosives by religious extremists.

Unlike last time when tip-offs helped the Maharashtra police foil the fidayeen attack on RSS headquarters at Nagpur, this time, Maharashtra and central sleuths failed to detect the plot.

"Every time, you cannot be lucky. Information as to which train they are going to attack and where is not easy to come by," said a top intelligence official engaged in counter-terror operations.

Officials here are convinced that the terrorists' objective was to cause communal mayhem in the city. The conviction is based on two facts.

First, the trains were targeted just after the communal-tinged violence in Bhiwandi, and the protests by Shiv Sainiks over the insult to the statue of Meenatai Thackeray by miscreants.

Times of India

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Background: Lashkar-e Toiba

Profile: Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI)

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp

Mumbai bombs: 'Pencil timers found'

MUMBAI, India (CNN) -- Timers hidden in pencils have been discovered in at least three of the seven sites where bombs exploded on commuter trains in India's financial capital, killed 185 people, according to CNN's sister station, CNN-IBN.

The timers are believed to have detonated bombs made of RDX, one of the most powerful kinds of military explosives, the network quoted police as saying Wednesday.

However, CNN could not independently confirm the discovery of the timers or the material used in the explosives.

No group has claimed responsibility for the blasts, which came in a span of 11 minutes during Tuesday evening's rush hour in Mumbai, when trains were jam-packed with commuters making their way home.

The Western Railway system carries more than 4.5 million passengers a day in the city formerly named Bombay.

Maharashtra state's police chief said more than 700 people were hurt, and hospitals continued appeals for blood donors.

Relatives and friends searched desperately for missing loved ones, posting messages at train stations and in the media as officials worked to identify the dead and injured.

Local train service resumed in most areas of Mumbai on Wednesday but long-distance trains were not running.

Indian shares recovered on the Bombay Stock Exchange after a shaky start on Wednesday, but investors remained cautious and dealing rooms were thinly staffed as nervous employees stayed at home. (Full story)

Meanwhile, as the investigations widened, police said the pencil timers were found at blast sites in Matunga station, Mahim and Borivili -- where authorities on Tuesday defused another bomb found after an initial explosion ripped apart a rail car.

Forensic tests are also being performed on a leather bag found at one of the stations, as well as on other items collected there.

Authorities said the bombs all appeared to have been planted on trains that left the Churchgate station in Mumbai, formerly named Bombay.

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Wed Jul 12 2006

The death toll from the Mumbai train bombings has reached 190 with 625 wounded.

Eight explosions tore through packed commuter trains in the city during yesterday's evening rush-hour.

Railway authorities and police worked throughout the night searching for clues and trying to get Mumbai's rail network up and running again.

Congress President Sonia Gandhi visited one of the blast sites and a hospital accompanied by the Home Minister and the Railway Minister.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks but suspicion is likely to centre on militants fighting New Delhi's rule in Kashmir who have been blamed for several previous attacks in the country.

Hizb-ul-Mujahideen is an umbrella grouping based in Pakistan of around a dozen Kashmiri militant groups.

Other militant groups active in Kashmir, like Lashkar-e-Taiba, largely recruit from Pakistan's central Punjab province and do not belong to Hizb-ul-Mujahideen.

Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan and both countries claim the territory in full.

India's commercial capital suffered similar serial blasts in 1993 that included the Bombay Stock Exchange, killing more than 250 people.

ITV News

Juan Cole speculates:

The likelihood is that the sophisticated coordinated attack on the trains in India's western commercial hub of Mumbai (Bombay) was carried out by al-Qaeda-linked groups seeking the independence of Muslim-majority Kashmir from India.

It is also possible that they are seeking, as Peter Bergen suggested on CNN, to encourage Hindus to attack Muslims, which will stampede the Muslims of India into the embrace of radical Islam (not a taste most of them have had in the past). Frustrated extremists are always trying to think up ways to make others feel their frustration and join their cause.

In other words, the best counter-terrorism India could do in this instance is to practice restraint and, after a decent interval, to go back to the negotiating table with Pakistan over Kashmir.

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The world knows Al Quaeda is alive in well in Southern Pakistan. Terrorists of the Taliban and Al Quaeda movements grow like weeds in Pakistan – conflict and skirmishes arise between two of the countries that border Pakistan; Afghanistan and India. (Currently China is an ally of Pakistan).

Would rescinding the 1947 partition of India rid the world of terrorism?

All nations of the world would have to adopt a coherent counter terrorism strategy. Best done with diplomacy at the UN where nations meet together on a regular basis. Terrorism will not be eradicated until there is a unified world-wide policy. Where there is state-sponsored terrorism, there have to be effective penalities or alternatives offered to them that cause them to abandon terrorism in preference to nonviolence within their borders.

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TerrorWatch

Pak, B'desh in Mumbai blasts cell

REUTERS

Mumbai, July 14: India broadened its search for the Mumbai bombers with police tracing calls made to Pakistan and Bangladesh as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh arrives in Mumbai on Friday to meet people wounded in the attacks.

Police continued raids in Mumbai and surrounding areas, a day after India named Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group as the prime suspect behind Tuesday's rail network bombings that killed 179 people and wounded hundreds more.

Officials had said the toll was 186, but revised it downwards due to what they said was duplication in counting.

Investigators said there were looking at international calls made from phone booths immediately after the blasts.

According to reports, authorities were probing a call from Mumbai to Karachi in Pakistan where the caller told his mother he was 'fine but could not reveal his location or talk at length and then hung up'.

Police detained a young man, dressed as a burqa-clad woman, late on Thursday night at the city's international airport, besides the 20 people already held.

"We have detained a man moving about suspiciously at the international terminal. He has been changing his statements," said Chandrahans Chauhan, a police investigator.

"He also claimed that he is a pilot."

The police had stepped up security in the city as the Prime Minister will visit at least one hospital and possibly a bomb site.

Investigators have also made sketches of three suspects seen at sites of the attacks, which hit crowded railway carriages and stations in the nation's financial hub during evening rush-hour.

Pakistan on Thursday ofered to help India in its investigation.

But India said that Pakistan was not doing enough to control militant groups on its soil which launch attacks on India.

"What I would like to say is they surely should do more," Anand Sharma said in an interview.

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Mumbai blasts: No RDX; LeT may not be involved

Press Trust of India / Mumbai July 14, 2006

Forensic examinations have confirmed that the explosives used in Tuesday's serial blasts in the city's suburban trains was not the deadly RDX, and it could have been dynamite or ammonium nitrate.

The revelation may change the focus of the probe on the alleged role of Laskhar-e-Toiba (LeT) in the blasts, police said.

Laboratory tests performed on nearly a dozen samples collected from the seven blast sites have confirmed that the explosive used was not RDX, a top Mumbai police official told PTI, but refused to reveal the nature of the explosive.

Intelligence sources, however, said it could be plain dynamite, which is commonly used in India for blasting rocks.

Intelligence source have also not ruled out the possibility of the use of ammonium nitrate in the explosives.

Mumbai police sources said the use of commonly used explosive material like dynamite or ammonium nitrate in the bomb blasts not only dilutes the theory of involvement of bigger terrorist groups like the LeT but also gives credence to the possible involvement of lesser sophisticated local groups.

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