New Delhi – A little-known group that police say has ties to Kashmir’s most feared militants claimed responsibility Sunday for a series of terrorist bombings that killed 59 people in New Delhi.
Authorities said they already had gathered useful clues about the near-simultaneous blasts Saturday night that ripped through a bus and two markets crowded ahead of the Hindu festival of Diwali, one of the year’s busiest shopping seasons.
Investigators reportedly raided dozens of small hotels across India’s capital looking for possible suspects, and police said “numerous” people were being questioned.
The attacks came at a particularly sensitive time as India and Pakistan were hashing out an unprecedented agreement to partially open the heavily militarized frontier that divides the disputed territory of Kashmir to speed relief to victims of a massive earthquake earlier this month.
The agreement was finalized early Sunday, and Indian officials appeared hesitant to quickly put the blame for the bombings on Pakistan-based militants, unlike in previous terrorist attacks during a 16-year-old insurgency by Islamic separatists in Kashmir.
India’s accusations of Pakistani involvement in a 2001 attack on Parliament put the two nuclear-armed rivals on the brink of a fourth war. But after pursuing peace efforts since early last year, both appeared intent on keeping the atmosphere calm.
“We have lots of information, but it is not proper to disclose it yet,” Indian Home Minister Shivraj Patil told journalists after an emergency meeting of the Cabinet.
A man called a local news agency in Indian Kashmir to say the militant Islamic Inquilab Mahaz, or Front for Islamic Uprising, staged the bombings, which police said killed 59 people and wounded 210.
The caller, who identified himself as Ahmed Yaar Ghaznavi, said the bombings were “meant as a rebuff to the claims of Indian security groups” that militants had been wiped out by security crackdowns and the Oct. 8 earthquake that devastated the mountains of Kashmir.
A senior police officer in India’s Jammu- Kashmir state said the caller’s name was not familiar to intelligence agencies, and New Delhi’s deputy police chief, Karnail Singh, said the group had not been very active since 1996.
However, while Singh refused to comment on the claim of responsibility, he said the group is linked to the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, the most feared of the dozens of Kashmiri militant groups.
Police said they also were looking for a man in his 20s who refused to buy a ticket on a bus and got off in the Govindpuri neighborhood, leaving behind a large black bag. When some of the 40 passengers raised an alarm, the driver and conductor examined it and threw it out just as the blast occurred, injuring them along with seven others.
