Blasts kill 10 in Indian courts

A series of co-ordinated explosions ripped through courts in three north Indian cities today killing at least 10 people and injuring dozens more.

The victims of the blasts in Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh state were mostly lawyers.

At least seven lawyers were killed in three explosions in Varanasi, one of Hinduism’s holiest cities. At least two of those bombs were attached to bicycles, police said.

In Faizabad, a pair of bombs killed three lawyers and injured 10 to 12 more. One of the bombs was on a motorbike.

The blasts, blamed on militants trying to spark unrest between India's Hindu majority and Muslim minority, were less than 15 minutes apart inside court complexes.

Indian court complexes are crowded, chaotic places, with lawyers often setting up small outdoor “offices” in makeshift, open-walled shacks built in courtyards. Many of the bombs apparently went off in such courtyards.

“It’s a conspiracy … This is the handiwork of some group that wants to disturb communal harmony in the country,” the junior home minister, Sriprakash Jaiswal, said. “They may have targeted the courts because large crowds gather in courthouses here.”

But Padam Kriti, a spokesman of the Uttar Pradesh Bar Association, said the state’s lawyers had decided earlier this year not to defend any terror suspects, adding “it looks like” that decision may have been behind blasts.

A series of terrorist bombings have ripped across India in the past two years. In August, a pair of explosions killed 43 people in the southern city of Hyderabad. In July 2006, bombs in seven Mumbai commuter trains killed more than 200 people.