INDIA: Indian police raided dozens of hotels and detained 20 suspects last night in the hunt for those responsible for a series of blasts in New Delhi that killed 61 people and left more than 200 injured.
Explosions tore through a bus and two crowded markets on Saturday night just as Indian and Pakistani diplomats from the nuclear-armed rivals were finalising a deal to open up their contested frontier in Kashmir for earthquake relief efforts.
An obscure Kashmiri militant organisation, Islami Inqilabi Mahaz (Islamic Revolutionary Group), telephoned local newspapers to claim responsibility for Saturday night's blasts and said "attacks will continue until India pulls out all its troops from the state of Kashmir".
The caller, who identified himself as Ahmed Yaar Ghaznavi, said the attack "was meant as a rebuff to the claims of Indian security groups" that militant fighters had been wiped out by military crackdowns and the South Asian earthquake on October 8th.
The claim of the group has yet to be verified, Karnail Singh, joint commissioner of Delhi police, told a press conference.
"We know that it was created in 1996 and it has not been very active, but it has links with Lashkar-e-Taiba," he said, referring to the most feared militant group in Kashmir.
Analysts had said the timing and sophisticated nature of the blasts appeared to be the work of Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (Force of the Pure). Many experts said that if Islamic extremists were behind the bombings, their motivation would be to destabilise the 20-month-old peace process between the two nuclear-armed neighbours. "Things are not going their way so the easiest act is to try to destroy the progress that has been made," said Uday Bhaskar of Delhi's Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis.
However, Pakistan's information minister, Sheikh Rashid, told Indian television channels that no one could "drive a wedge between the two countries because both are committed to peace".
The opening of the de facto border, known as the Line of Control, for relief operations was a big step forward, he said. Islamic militants in Kashmir have for 16 years been seeking independence from India.
But despite the blasts, the two sides agreed to open the border in five places next week. Aid supplies will be allowed to cross at those points and Kashmiri civilians on foot, with priority given to those with families divided by the border.
The Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, visited the injured yesterday and denounced the apparently co-ordinated bombings as "dastardly acts of terrorism".
Outside the burns unit of the All India Institute of Medicine, relatives waited for news. "This boy, Sayan, is my nephew. If he is alive then he has nobody left in the world," said Sudeep Chatterjee. "I could only identify his mother's body from her bangles and his father is lying dead. But there is no sign of Sayan. He is only 13, where can he be?"
There were scares at two school fairs after an unattended bag was found at one and information was received about a bomb at another. No bombs were found. The authorities announced a reward of 100,000 rupees for clues to the whereabouts of the bombers. Shivraj Patil, India's home minister, told reporters "we have lots of information, but it is not proper to disclose it yet".
Officials also handed out sketches of two men they want to question.
One is said to have left a pressure cooker near a gas cylinder at the southern Sarojini Nagar market, where most of the casualties occurred. The other, in his 20s, got off a bus and left behind a large black bag. The driver and bus conductor threw it out just as the blast occurred, injuring them both.