Pakistan-linked terror group claims Indian bomb blasts

A little-known group that police say has ties to Pakistan-based militants fighting in divided Kashmir took credit for three blasts that killed 59 people in New Delhi, but Indian officials appeared hesitant to immediately blame anyone on the Pakistani side of the frontier.

Authorities said they already had gathered useful clues about the near-simultaneous blasts on Saturday night that ripped through a bus and two markets crowded with shoppers ahead of the Hindu festival of Diwali.

Investigators reportedly raided dozens of small hotels across India’s capital looking for suspects, and police said “numerous” people were being questioned.

Security was tight across New Delhi as residents, shaken by the blasts, returned to work today.

The attacks came at particularly sensitive time as India and Pakistan hashed out an unprecedented agreement to partially open the heavily militarised frontier that divides the disputed territory of Kashmir to speed relief to victims of the region’s Oct. 8 earthquake.

The agreement was finalised early yesterday, and Indian officials balked at quickly putting the blame for the bombings on Pakistan-based militants, unlike in previous terror attacks during a 16-year-old insurgency by Islamic separatists in India’s part of Kashmir.

India’s accusations of Pakistani involvement in a 2001 attack on parliament put the two nuclear-armed rivals on the brink of a fourth war. But they pulled back and, after pursuing peace efforts since early last year, both appeared intent on keeping the atmosphere calm.

“We have lots of information but it is not proper to disclose it yet,” Indian Home Minister Shivraj Patil told journalists after an emergency Cabinet meeting to discuss the attacks. “The investigation is going well.”

Pakistan’s government was quick to condemn the bombings.

A man called a local news agency in Indian Kashmir to say the militant Islamic Inquilab Mahaz, or Front for Islamic Uprising, staged the bombings, which police said killed 59 people and wounded 210.

The caller, who identified himself as Ahmed Yaar Ghaznavi, said the bombings were “meant as a rebuff to the claims of Indian security groups” that militants had been wiped out by security crackdowns and the October 8 quake that devastated the insurgents’ heartland in the mountains of Kashmir.

A senior police officer in India’s Jammu-Kashmir state said the caller’s name was not familiar to intelligence agencies, and New Delhi’s deputy police chief, Karnail Singh, said the group had not been very active since 1996.

However, while Singh refused to comment on the claim of responsibility, he said the group is linked to the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, the most feared of the dozens of Kashmiri militant groups.

A leading anti-terrorism expert said that the timing and nature of the blasts pointed to Lashkar.

“It looks like Lashkar. They are the most active group here,” said Vikram Sood, the former head of the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s foreign intelligence agency.

After the attacks, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party – India’s main opposition party – called on the government to review what it called the “soft border” policy agreed to with Pakistan.