INDIA: India yesterday blamed a Pakistan-backed Muslim terrorist group for attacking two Hindu temples in northern, disputed Jammu and Kashmir state in which 13 people, including worshippers, were killed and over 50 injured.
Pakistan condemned the strike on the Hindu temples as a "terrorist" act, but rejected India's accusations that it was in any way responsible. "The motivation behind the attacks seems to be to enhance tension in the region," an official statement in the Pakistani capital Islamabad said, expressing sympathy with the bereaved families and with the injured.
"Monitoring the communication network of terrorists (in Kashmir) indicates that Sunday night's attack is the handiwork of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT or Army of the Pure)," India's deputy prime minister Lal Kishen Advani told parliament.
Mr Advani, who is also federal home minister, was referring to the Pakistan-based Muslim terrorist group that is one of the main insurgent outfits fighting Kashmir's 13-year old civil war that has claimed over 37,500 lives. Based near the Pakistani border city of Lahore, the LeT believes in waging jihad (holy Islamic war) against the "evil of democracy" to establish global Islamic hegemony.
Two terrorists, armed with assault rifles and grenades, who stormed and besieged two popular adjoining Hindu temples in the state's winter capital Jammu were shot dead after an overnight firefight around 7 a.m. yesterday.
They seized the 142-year-old Raghunath temple, annually visited by millions of Hindu pilgrims from across India, and the nearby Shiv temple after detonating a mine in the crowded bazaars surrounding the holy places .
It took hundreds of security personnel nearly 12 hours to regain control of the two temples after killing the gunmen. Overnight curfew continues in Jammu where people are incensed over the government's inability in countering militant strikes.
Mr Advani said the series of terrorist attacks in Kashmir since Friday in which over 50 people had died, coincided with the formation of a new government in Pakistan. The temple attack, he added, was part of a "deliberate design" by Pakistan to create a communal divide in Jammu and Kashmir between Hindus and Muslims.
Pakistan admitted fuelling the Kashmiri insurgency earlier this year, promising to "conclusively and permanently" end it. India disputes these assurances given by Pakistan's President Musharraf.
