Police detain four people over bombings

Indian police have detained four men for questioning about bombings that killed 20 people at a temple and train station in Hinduism’s holiest city, a top state official said today.

Two of them resembled the sketches of two suspects issued earlier by police, said Alok Sinha, a top Home Ministry official in Uttar Pradesh state. The other two, also picked up in the state on Friday night, were their acquaintances, he said.

Local residents alerted police after spotting the men in Hardoi, a town in Uttar Pradesh state nearly 210 miles southeast of New Delhi, Sinha said.

All the four are from neighbouring Bihar state.

Meanwhile, about 150 Hindu and Muslim residents marched today through the streets of Varanasi, a city famed for its shrines on the banks of the Ganges River, shouting slogans against terrorism and urging Pakistan to foster friendship with India.

“Pakistan, end terrorism from Kashmir to Kashi (Varanasi),” they chanted at the march organised by the Human Welfare Association, a non-governmental organisation involved in educating 1,700 poor children in the city.

Naushaba, a Muslim counsellor who uses one name, said she hoped to promote peace.

On Friday, a senior police official said a Kashmiri militant killed by officers in northern India hours after Tuesday’s bombings was suspected of masterminding the attack on a temple and train station in Varanasi.

The dead man – identified only as Salim – ran the operations of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, a Kashmiri militant group, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where Varanasi is located, said Yashpal Singh, the state’s top officer.

A previously unknown Kashmiri group took credit for the bombings. But Singh said there were “strong indications” that the attack was the work of Lashkar, the best-known militant group fighting to wrest predominantly Muslim Kashmir from largely Hindu India.

The sketches were drawn from the statements of witnesses who said they saw men planting a bomb at a market in Varanasi that failed to detonate and was later defused by police.

More than 80% of India’s billion people are Hindu and relations between them and Muslims, the country’s largest religious minority, have been largely peaceful since the partition of the subcontinent at independence from Britain in 1947, when more than one million people were killed.

But there have been sporadic bouts of savage violence, often sparked by attacks on temples or mosques.