New Delhi, India – With frightening precision, several explosions in rapid succession struck a busy commuter railway in Mumbai on Tuesday evening, killing at least 190 people, injuring hundreds more and turning the rush hour into a grisly tableau of carnage.
In what officials said was a well-coordinated terrorist attack on India’s financial capital, the blasts went off within minutes of one another in trains and on platforms along the length of a rail line carrying thousands of passengers home to Mumbai’s western and northern suburbs.
It was the most lethal attack on Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, since 1993, when bombs believed to have been planted by underworld figures ripped through various parts of the city, including its famous stock exchange, and killed more than 250.
The new spasm of violence was also the deadliest to hit India since a series of bombs went off in New Delhi in October, an incident blamed on armed separatists waging battle to turn the disputed region of Kashmir into an independent Muslim state or a part of archrival Pakistan.
Suspicion immediately fell on such militant groups in connection with Tuesday’s near-simultaneous explosions, a method known to be favored by Kashmiri extremists.
The city’s commuter rail system is one of the most heavily used in the world, carrying about 6 million people a day. The explosions, along a single rail corridor in a western sector of the port city, caught passengers in very close quarters.
The force of the explosions reduced some carriages to smoking heaps of mangled metal, blew others apart and flung body parts and luggage along the tracks.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, and authorities did not say whether the explosions were set off remotely or caused by suicide bombers.
Confusion reigned for hours as police and ambulances scrambled to reach the blast sites, hampered by the city’s nightmarish traffic and the heavy rains of the monsoon season.
Television footage showed victims trying to help one another or pressing handkerchiefs against their own bleeding wounds.
Police officials said at least 190 people were killed and 625 injured. The death toll is certain to rise and could climb past 200, one police official said.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh condemned the attack, calling it a “shameful act” of terrorism and summoning members of his Cabinet for an emergency meeting Tuesday night.
Home Minister Shivraj Patil told reporters that the government had previously received information of a planned assault, but the “place and time was not known.”
With rumors already swirling about the suspected involvement of Islamic militants, here in a land where religious tension often boils over into mob violence, Patil appealed to his compatriots to stay calm and to refrain from jumping to conclusions.
“We will work to defeat the evil designs of terrorists and will not allow them to succeed,” he said.
Pakistan, too, was quick to denounce the attack as “a despicable act of terrorism,” despite repeated accusations by India that it harbors, funds and arms the separatist groups in Kashmir.
Peace talks between the two nuclear-armed neighbors, which have gone to war twice over their claims to the Himalayan territory, have made only incremental progress.
Only hours before the Mumbai blasts, grenade attacks in Srinagar, the capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir, killed eight Indian tourists.
It was not known whether the events in Srinagar and Mumbai were connected.
The first explosion to hit Mumbai struck shortly after 6 p.m. on the city’s western commuter railway, inaugurating a chain of blasts up and down the crowded line over the next half hour.
