AS MANY as 100 people are believed to have died and scores were injured after a bomb ripped through three crowded carriages of a passenger train in India's north eastern state of Assam yesterday.
Originally, as many as 300 were thought to have died. Police said three carriages of the Brahamputra Mail headed for New Delhi were blown apart by the blast while the engine and at least 10 sections of the train were derailed with the impact at Chechamukh, a small station around 240 kms from the state capital, Guwahati.
Police said some 300 people were travelling in the three carriages and there were around 1,500 on the entire train.
At least 68 injured survivors from the packed train, which was carrying some 1,500 passengers to the Indian capital of New Delhi, have been taken to hospital and 28 bodies have been recovered, a police spokesman said.
The injured were being transported to a hospital in neighbouring West Bengal state as local doctors have been on strike since last week in protest at the killing of one of their colleagues.
The blast took place at 7.15 p.m. local time (2.15 pm. Irish time), a few minutes after the train left the Kokrajhar station where police officials suspect the bomb was placed on the train.
Nobody has claimed responsibility for the blast, but separatists from the outlawed Bodo Liberation Tiger Force, a group of guerillas from the Bodo tribe who been fighting for an independent homeland in Assam since the mid1980s, are suspected.
Officials said the spot where the blast occurred was controlled by the Bodo separatists who have been fighting the Indian army for the past five years.
The Bodos, tribesmen living in Assam for hundreds of years, claim their culture and livelihood are threatened by Muslims from neighbouring Bangladesh who continue to migrate to the state, settling on the fertile banks of the Brahmaputra river which flows through Assam.
The Bodos are primarily farmers and woodsmen. They took up arms against the state government after negotiations to protect their rights failed and raised their demand for an independent Bodoland in upper Assam, bordering the neighbouring Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.
Initially they waged war against the state police and paramilitary forces with spears and bows and arrows but over the past five years they have acquired sophisticated weapons.
Police officials in Guwahati said the train blast was not only the Bodo separatists' most destructive attack but seemed well planned as they had blown away a key bridge early in the morning, snapping links between Assam and six contiguous north eastern states and the rest of India. Seven people were injured in the blast. Officials said that with the bridge blown up, all rescue and medical teams would have to travel a circuitous and lengthy route to get to the bombed train site.
The state's Chief Minister, Mr Prafulla Mahanta, has summoned an emergency meeting of security officials and is considering imposing a state of emergency. The army too has been placed on alert and is expected to carry out search and cordon operations at first light today.
Deputy Kokrajhar district police chief R.K. Kumar said 36 of the 68 injured were in serious condition but added that the toll of dead and injured was not expected to be as high as some officials had feared. "We thought of hundreds of bodies being recovered initially," he said. So far only 28 bodies have been recovered."
The remote site of the blast is accessible only by train, delaying the arrival of rescue workers, officials said.
"The site at which the accident took place is covered by forests on one side and tea plantations on the other," Kumar added. "This makes it more difficult for the rescue teams to reach the site."
