INDIA:Police defused 19 unexploded bombs recovered from public places in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad yesterday, shortly after 43 people died in serial blasts blamed by officials on Islamic militants based in neighbouring Bangladesh and Pakistan.
According to news reports from Hyderabad, the clutch of unexploded improvised explosive devices fitted with timers and placed in plastic bags were recovered at bus stops, road junctions, pedestrian bridges, near cinemas and public taps.
Had these exploded the death toll, especially in the poorer and more crowded areas, would have been horrific in the teeming city with a population of more than seven million, officials said.
Anticipating trouble, the federal government yesterday dispatched additional paramilitary units to Hyderabad after three bombs packed with metal pellets exploded at a food centre and an amusement park on Saturday night, killing women and children and severely injuring 80 others.
No one claimed responsibility for the explosions that went off within minutes of each other and guaranteed to cause maximum damage in a confined place.
"The metal pellets in the bombs worked as deadly missiles, killing more people than the blasts," Dr K Shastry of the hospital that received many of the dead and wounded said.
Eleven people died in the two near simultaneous blasts at the Lumbini amusement park during the weekly laser light show, while 32 others were killed in the explosion at a nearby crowded restaurant in the commercial district.
"I had gone shopping with my mother and we had stopped to eat when the blast occurred," said Pawan Aggarwal from his hospital bed. "We were lucky but we saw so many people dead. There was blood everywhere."
State chief minister Rajashekhar Reddy blamed Islamist militant groups in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh for the bombings.
Saturday's explosions came three months after 11 Muslim worshippers were killed and five others shot in subsequent clashes with police after a bomb exploded in Hyderabad's 17th century Mecca Mosque.
Mr Reddy held militant groups in the two neighbouring countries responsible for this bombing too, though investigations into the attack remain incomplete.
Many Muslims, who comprise about a third of Hyderabad's population, believed that Hindu extremists were to blame for the mosque bombing and attacked the majority community resulting in the police opening fire to quell the rioting.
"This [ sectarian clashes] is the outcome the bombers wanted and got after the earlier blasts. Their motivation this time round too was the same, but so far, there has not been any communal backlash," a security official said.
Relations between the two communities in Hyderabad like elsewhere in India - where Muslims constitute about 13 per cent of the country's population of over 1.2 billion - have become strained in recent years.
Islamic insurgent groups active in India and abroad have further deepened the chasm between Hindus and Muslims across the country.
"This communal faultline is India's vulnerability which forces inimical to its interests are successfully exploiting, going to the extent of even bombing mosques," security analyst Arun Sahgal said.
Security officials suspect Saturday's blasts like those in May were executed by the Bangladesh-based militant group HuJI.
Although little information on HuJI's role was made public at that time, because of sensitive and turbulent diplomatic and political relations between India and Bangladesh, intelligence sources said the terror group, created with "direct aid" from Osama bin Laden in 1992, had "exponentially increased" its activities across India. A number of transnational Islamist terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, are believed to have established a presence in Bangladesh in alliance with several fundamentalist organisations.
Security officials said HuJI had close links with Pakistan-based terrorist groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammed and the Lashkar-e-Toiba, both recently banned by Islamabad under US pressure. They said it maintained these associations through Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID) that collaborated closely with Bangladesh's Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI).
The ISID and the DGFI had links from before 1971, when Bangladesh was East Pakistan. These ties had been resurrected in recent years to face the common enemy, India.
Initially together they had co-ordinated activities between insurgent groups in India's northeastern states and Islamist extremist elements in Bangladesh, and more recently expanded these operations to other parts of the country.