At least 40 killed in Bombay bomb attacks

At least 40 people were killed and 150 wounded when two bombs rocked a crowded market and a historical landmark today in India’s financial capital Bombay, police said.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the blasts, but they came on the same day as the release of a long-anticipated archaeological report on a religious site in northern India claimed by both Hindus and Muslims. The dispute has been linked to previous bombings.

Telephone lines were jammed and mobile phone services briefly crashed as panicked residents called family and friends. Police issued security alerts for Bombay and New Delhi, the capital, calling policemen back from leave in case of further trouble.

The bombings killed at least 40 people and wounded 150 others, city police commissioner Javed Ahmed said.

One explosion was at the Gateway of India, a tourist attraction built by the British to commemorate the 1911 visit of King George V.

The other rocked the Zaveri Bazaar, a crowded jewellery market. Police said earlier reports of four explosions had been wrong.

The carnage shocked even those accustomed to bloodshed.

“I have never seen anything so horrible,” said S Manoj, a doctor at Bombay’s JJ Hospital. “It was just body parts, some with their abdominal organs hanging out, some with no faces at all. The bodies were all burnt.”

The body parts were placed on stretchers, covered with blood-smeared white sheets and wheeled to the mortuary.

Manoj said some of the injured had been trampled in stampedes after the explosions, and came in with multiple broken bones.

“The building we were in shook and we heard a loud noise,” said Ingrid Alva, a PR consultant who works near the gateway. “I rushed out and saw the crowds at the Gateway of India ... We saw some body parts lying around, before we were told to move away by the police.”

The blast broke windows at the Taj Mahal Hotel, which is across the street from the gateway, and damaged cars in the car park, said Ravi Dubey, the hotel’s communications manager.

Stock prices fell quickly following the blast reports. The benchmark index of Bombay Stock Exchange, the Sensex, closed at 4,005, down 119 points or 3%.

The explosions came just hours after the release of the archaeological report on the religious site in the northern town of Ayodhya.

In March, a bomb attack on a Bombay train, which police blamed on Islamic militants, killed 11 people and wounded 64 others. That explosion came a day after the 10th anniversary of a series of bombings in Bombay – also blamed on Islamic militants – which killed more than 250 people and injured 1,000.

Police say those bombings were in retaliation for the 1992 destruction by Hindus mobs of the 16th-century Ayodhya mosque, and to avenge Muslim deaths in the nationwide riots that followed.

Some Hindus claim the mosque was built centuries ago on the ruins of a Hindu temple that marked the birthplace of their supreme god, Rama.

The report, issued by the government archaeological agency, indicated there had been some sort of ancient structure at the site, lawyers for both sides said, though they disagreed on whether it said there had actually been a temple.

The report was released to lawyers and has not been made available to the public or the media.