Saturday, September 09, 2006
Indian police on alert after blast kills 31 after Muslim prayers in troubled city (12:40 a.m.)
NASHIK, India -- Twin bombs rigged to bicycles exploded Friday amid throngs of Muslims as they left afternoon prayers at a mosque in the western city of Malegaon, killing 31 people and leaving 100 injured, officials said.
A top state official called the blasts "a terrorist act," and authorities -- fearing revenge attacks across the country's fragile religious divides -- quickly clamped a curfew over Malegaon and put security forces on alert across the region.
Malegaon, a center of India's textile industry, has long been the scene of violence between Hindus and Muslims.
While it was unclear who was behind the attacks, which happened near one of the city's main mosques, officials aggressively deployed teams of police to sensitive parts of the state.
"Law and order is under control," P.S. Pasricha, Maharashtra state's director-general of police, told The Associated Press.
"There's a high alert across the state. We have activated all police machinery to ensure that communal harmony is maintained."
Malegaon, a city of about 500,000 that is 75 percent Muslim, is in Maharashtra.
The bombings were intended to spark wider violence, officials said.
"It is a terrorist act. It is done by people who don't want peace," Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, who announced the new death toll, said at a press conference in Mumbai, the state capital. Of the 100 people injured, he said, 56 were seriously hurt.
Pasricha told reporters that "the motive appears to be to create panic and make Hindus and Muslims fight with each other." He also spoke in Mumbai.
Both bombs were rigged to bicycles, said Deshmukh.
"We found packets with the explosives attached to these bicycles," he said.
The office of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said he "appealed for peace and communal harmony and has urged all citizens across the country to remain calm."
India has suffered through a series of terror bombings over the past year, most recently a carefully planned series of attacks on Mumbai's commuter trains in July that left more than 200 people dead. Those bombings were blamed on Pakistan-based Muslim militants.
Earlier this week, Singh warned that India may be facing even bloodier attacks.
"Reports also suggest that terrorist modules and 'sleeper cells' exist in some of our urban areas, all of which highlight the seriousness of the threat," Singh told India's state chief ministers during a conference on internal security.
"The situation is tense," said Nashik Superintendent of Police Rajvardhan, who uses only one name. Nashik is about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Malegaon.
The explosions came as Muslims celebrated the festival of Shabe Barat, or the Night of Fortune, when they hold night-long prayers seeking divine blessings, exchange sweets with neighbors and relatives, and set off fireworks.
Malegaon has been the scene of religious violence in the past, with riots between Hindus and Muslims occurring most recently in 2001, when 15 people were killed -- but stretching back to 1962.
The U.S. Ambassador to India, David C. Mulford, deplored the bombings.
"There can be no justification for such heinous acts," he said in a statement. "The United States stands with India in its fight against terrorism."
India's bloodiest religious violence in recent years came in 2002, in the western state of Gujarat, set off by a train fire that killed 60 Hindus returning from a religious pilgrimage.
Muslims were blamed for the fire, and more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslim, were killed by Hindu mobs. India is about 80 percent Hindu.
Human rights groups have accused the state government, led by the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party -- the party which then also controlled the national government -- of doing little to stop the violence.
The Bharatiya Janata Party lost power in the national Parliament in 2004. (AP) |
