Indian police hunt bombers

Indian police have arrested an alleged Kashmiri militant whom they believe planned the October 29 triple bombings in New Delhi and are now hunting for seven others including the bombers, an official said in New Delhi today.

“We are happy to announce the working out of the recent blast cases” (in New Delhi), the city’s police chief, K K Paul, told reporters.

He said the breakthrough came with the arrest Thursday of Tariq Ahmad Dar, allegedly a key member of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyaba militant group, in Kashmir’s city of Srinagar.

Dar was brought to New Delhi on Friday for interrogation, and reportedly revealed a wealth of information about the plot, which police had initially blamed on Lashkar-e-Tayyaba.

Lashkar is one of the most prominent of several Muslim militant groups fighting Indian security forces in Jammu-Kashmir, the only Muslim-majority state in predominantly Hindu India.

More than 60,000 people have been killed since 1989 in the fighting in Kashmir, which is divided between India and Pakistan. Both countries claim the territory in its entirety, and the militant groups want either independence for the state or its merger with Pakistan.

“It is quite clear” now that Lashkar was behind the near-simultaneous attacks in the Indian capital, Paul said.

The bombings in three crowded markets killed 60 people and injured more than 200 on the eve of the major Hindu festival of Diwali, as thousands of people were doing last-minute shopping.

Dar has not been formally charged, but police have obtained a court’s permission to detain him for 14 days for further investigation to help catch at seven other suspects, including those who planted the bombs, Paul said.

Dar was not in New Delhi on the day of the bombings, but he is “an important financier, conspirator and co-ordinator of Lashkar,” said Paul, adding that Dar works as a sales representative for a pharmaceutical company in Srinagar, the summer capital of India’s Jammu-Kashmir state.