Mumbai bombs kill over 160

[Mule]

MUMBAI (Reuters) - Bombs exploded on packed commuter trains and stations in India's financial hub, Mumbai, on Tuesday, killing over 160 people and wounding hundreds, officials said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the seven bomb explosions that took place within about 10 minutes during evening rush hour.



But suspicion was likely to centre on Muslim militants fighting New Delhi's rule in disputed Kashmir, who have been blamed for several bomb attacks in India in the past.

"The death toll is 163 and around 460 people have been injured," police inspector Ashok Jadhav told Reuters.

"We are not sure if it is RDX or not," city Police Commissioner A.N. Roy
said, referring to the possible use of high-powered plastic explosives.

Commuters fled suburban rail stations in panic after the explosions and mobile phone lines were jammed. Hundreds of dazed passengers walked along the railway tracks.

Television showed twisted rail carriages and people in torn, blood-stained clothes carrying the dead and wounded on stretchers as steady monsoon rain fell. A policeman was shown carrying two white, blood-stained bundles of what appeared to be body parts.
"The blasts happened when the trains were most crowded," D.K Shankaran, chief secretary of the state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, told Reuters.

At peak hours, each nine-car passenger train in Mumbai carries over 4,500 people, about three times the rated capacity.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called for calm and Sonia Gandhi, leader of the ruling Congress party, expressed her grief.

"I urge the people to remain calm, not to believe rumours and carry on their activity normally," Singh said in a statement, calling the explosions a "shameful act".
The United States called the bomb attacks "senseless acts of violence". Pakistan, the EU, France and Britain also condemned the explosions.

FEW SIGNS OF HELP

At the city's Sion hospital, relatives were frantically looking for friends and relatives. Scores pored over a board displaying a list of injured.

"I spoke to him 10 minutes before he died," said Haji Mastan, sobbing uncontrollably after being told about the death of his cousin Mukti Darvesh, who was travelling on one of the trains.

"Why did it have to end like this? He was young and he has children." Some of the people who entered a makeshift morgue were unable to identify badly mutilated bodies.
The blasts occurred on five trains and at two stations in Mumbai's western suburbs, which are linked to the downtown office and business areas mainly by an overground rail network that is used by some 6.5 million people each day.

Railway authorities suspended all suburban train services in the city after the blasts.

Dazed survivors with wounds from injuries to heads, legs and hands waited at railway stations, with little sign of any emergency medical aid.

"We heard a loud blast in one of the train compartments. When we rushed there and looked, we saw people with severed limbs and grievous injuries," one witness told the CNN-IBN news channel, standing in a blood-spattered coach.
"There were no police or railway people to help."

The first attack took place at 6.24 p.m. (1154 GMT) with the others following in quick succession.

"Incidents had taken place in the space of 10 minutes. It appears to be pre-planned," Anil Sharma, chief security commissioner of Western Railway, told CNN-IBN television channel.

SRINAGAR VIOLENCE

The Mumbai blasts came just hours after suspected Islamist militants killed seven people, six of them tourists, in a series of grenade attacks in Indian Kashmir's main city, Srinagar, police said, the most concerted targeting of civilians in months.
Kashmir has been split between India and Pakistan since shortly after the two countries gained independence from Britain in 1947, but both claim it in full.

Pakistan's Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying that President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz strongly condemned the "terrorist attack" in Mumbai.

Mumbai, a metropolis of about 17 million formerly known as Bombay, has been hit by bomb blasts in the past decade.

More than 250 people died in a string of bomb explosions in the city in 1993 for which authorities blamed the city's underworld criminal gangs.

Those attacks followed the demolition of a mosque in the Hindu holy city of Ayodhya.
(Additional reporting by M.C. Govardhana Rangan, Anurag Joshi, Bappa Majumdar, Kaustav Roy, and Charlotte Cooper in MUMBAI)

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/news...NDIA-BLAST.xml

[pmat]

Bloody awful. I hope they catch the bastards responsible.

[pmat]

NEW DELHI: The terror attack on Mumbai trains was carried out by Lashkar-e-Toiba and local Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) activists and was designed to trigger communal conflagration in the country’s financial capital, intelligence sources said.

While still waiting for clues to emerge, top intelligence sources in New Delhi seem pretty sure the blasts on the trains were plotted by Lashkar modules which are increasingly collaborating with activists of SIMI, which boasts of strong pockets of influence across Maharashtra.

The estimate of intelligence agencies here is derived from the scale of the attack, as well as precise information about the Lashkar’s sleeper cells that have proliferated in Maharashtra.

Sources in the home ministry, in fact, said that a carnage had seemed very much on the cards with information pouring in about stockpiling of arms and explosives by religious extremists.

Unlike last time when tip-offs helped the Maharashtra police foil the fidayeen attack on RSS headquarters at Nagpur, this time, Maharashtra and central sleuths failed to detect the plot.

"Every time, you cannot be lucky. Information as to which train they are going to attack and where is not easy to come by," said a top intelligence official engaged in counter-terror operations.

Officials here are convinced that the terrorists' objective was to cause communal mayhem in the city. The conviction is based on two facts.

First, the trains were targeted just after the communal-tinged violence in Bhiwandi, and the protests by Shiv Sainiks over the insult to the statue of Meenatai Thackeray by miscreants.

timesofindia

[fantom]

These Mother f***ers terrorists are every where. C*nts !

[evilsatan]

These Mother f***ers terrorists are every where. C*nts !

This thread isn't allowed because of post like that mate, that's not to say I don't agree with you, but the arguements this thread may cause are the problem and its not always tasteful content.

My opinion on this subject is I am becomming desensitised to such attacks, thats how frequent they are! I obviously still care its going on and care for those involved, but I remember my reaction for 9/11 and London, this just felt like a normal day.

[CzarJunkie]

This thread isn't allowed because of post like that mate, that's not to say I don't agree with you, but the arguements this thread may cause are the problem and its not always tasteful content.

What? I don't think you'll find anyone here who'll argue with him here. Terrorists are motherfuckers. I think that's a given.