Jaipur blasts

13 May 2008

Terrorists struck for the first time in Jaipur triggering seven blasts in a span of 12 minutes on Tuesday night in crowded market areas and near a Hanuman temple in the walled city leaving at least 60 killed and 200 injured. Severed limbs, mangled heaps of cycle rickshaws, bicycles and smashed windscreens of cars turned the crowded markets crammed with peak-time shoppers in the walled part of the Pink City into a virtual war zone minutes after serial bomb blasts were set off by terrorists.

Utter chaos and panic prevailed soon after the blasts took place in a span of 20 minutes. Scores of wounded people were ferried to three hospitals soon after blasts hit at Tripolia Bazar, where a large number of devotees turned up at a hanuman temple, Johari Bazar, Manank Chowk, Badi Choupad and Choti Choupad in the walled part of the city. 

It is for the first time that the tourist hotspot, Jaipur has figured on terror hit list. Within minutes of the blast, one could see siren blaring ambulances and vehicles zipping though the by lanes. The blasts triggered a near-stampede situation at the blast sites as panic-stricken people ran helter skelter in search of a safe place. People were also seen carrying the injured as the number of ambulances fell far short of the requirement.

The nearby hospitals were crowded as relatives thronged to look for their near and dear ones.

Bangladesh-based Harkut-ul-Jehadi Islami is suspected to be behind the blasts that has taken the state authorities by surprise, home ministry sources said. The sources ruled out the use of RDX in the carefully orchestrated low-intensity explosions which were suspected to have been set off from cycles in areas including near the famous Hawa Mahal which are frequented by domestic and foreign tourists. 

The blasts rocked Tripolia Bazar, where large number of devotees turned up at a Hanuman temple, Johari Bazar, Manas Chowk, Badi Choupal and Choti Choupal -- all located within a two-km radius in the old city.

At one of the blast sites, the body of a newly-wed woman, dressed in a bright red saree with traditional (chuda) "marriage bangles", lay on the road. Another young man was hung out of a rickshaw with his head turned back and his face smeared with blood. Johri Bazar, one of the biggest shopping markets, which was rocked by the blasts, lay strewn with bangles and mangled rickshaws. 

Also strewn around were shopping bags, bloodstained sandals and shoes of victims.

At Sawai Mansing Hospital, the emergency ward was splattered with blood as scores of dead and injured were taken there. Drenched in blood, people were seen running with their mobile phones glued to their ears informing their kins about their condition. 

A puddle of blood formed outside the Hanuman Temple at Tripolia Bazar where a ten-year-old boy perished in the blast. Within minutes, the whole temple complex and the market were cleared of the crowd as people ran for safety. Police were seen warning the people against touching any unidentified or unclaimed objects.

one explosive was defused by bomb disposal squad near the Hanuman temple. Rapid Action Force personnel were deployed in Jaipur to help deal with the situation as security was beefed up.

Uttar Pradesh blasts

23 November 2007

Indian Judiciary was never the target in the history of terrorism in India but on Friday, 23 November 2007, three near-simultaneous explosions went off within minutes of each other in Varanasi, Faizabad and Lucknow in the State of Uttar Pradesh, India.

The first explosion occurred in the Varanasi civil court, which killed nine people and injured 45 others. The second explosion took place within five minutes of the first blast in Faizabad, where three bombs left four people dead and fourteen injured. The third explosion took place in Lucknow, which did not cause any casualties.

Total of 13 people were killed and 60 others injured in the five bombs, which were synchronized to explode shortly after 1315 hrs (Indian Standard Time).All the bombs exploded inside the court complexes, but not inside courtrooms. Overall, five bombs exploded, while one bomb each was recovered from Faizabad and Lucknow later.

Preliminary investigations were conducted and some sketches of the suspects were released. used in the 11 May 2007 attack in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, as well as the 25 August 2007 blasts in Hyderabad. The blasts were triggered by locally-made quartz alarm clocks while the cycles used for planting the bombs were also locally bought on Wednesday, 21 November 2007. 

Although the Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) used in the attacks do not seem to be highly sophisticated, the synchronization of the blasts across three cities at about the same time indicates a certain level of sophistication in the planning and implementation of the attacks. A parallel may be drawn here with the 400 synchronized bombings in Bangladesh in August 2005 by the Jaamiat’ul Mujahideen (JuM) which also targeted lawyers and courthouses in Bangladesh.

According to police reports, the Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad blasts point to the involvement of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) planners and local HuJI operatives. Okasa, the man accused by recently detained JeM militants of planning to conduct a kidnapping of Rahul Gandhi in Lucknow, is still at large and reportedly in touch with Athar Ibrahim, brother of Masood Azhar, who heads the JeM. 

The JeM, which is responsible for the attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001, is considered to be one of the most lethal groups capable of conducting operations against India. Also, security agencies and the Uttar Pradesh police are questioning the role of Mohammed Tuffail Hussaini, Harkatul-Jehadi Islamic (HuJI) militant in connection with the Lucknow serial blasts as his kin have been arrested for questioning. However, in an email which was sent to a private TV channel in India, a little known entity called the ‘Indian Mujahideen’ claimed responsibility for the attack. 

The email was sent on Friday morning, 23 November 2007, from a cyber café in Laxmi Nagar, East Delhi by guru_alhind@yahoo.fr, warning of attacks against lawyers in UP. A second email from gurus_boys2000@yahoo.com was sent as a threat to the Pakistani cricket team asking them to withdraw from the current Test series against India. The email also included a list of future attacks in prominent cities and metropolises in India.

However, the authenticity of the emails is still to be verified. The identity of the perpetrators of the attacks thus remains a point of contestation.

The reason for the blasts seems to be a retaliatory act against lawyers. At present, all thethree civil courts of Lucknow, Faizabad and Varanasi are holding trials of major terrorist attacks in Uttar Pradesh. It was recently reported that lawyers in the Lucknow district court had assaulted the three JeM operatives who were arrested. In many cases of terrorist incidents, lawyers refused to defend the accused. In Faizabad, where the case of the attack on the Ram Janmabhoomi of 2005 is being heard, the court had to appoint an officer to defend the five accused, because no lawyer agreed to do so. Also, in Varanasi, the entire bar council resolved not to fight the case for Waliullah, the prime accused in the 2006 Sankat Mochan terror attack. Indian security analysts believe that the email sent out before the UP blasts maybe the first of a new kind of ‘Islamist’ terrorism in India. The email specified that the Indian Mujahideen group were not foreign mujahideens or affiliated to any organization.

outside India e.g. the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) or Harkatul-jihad-e-Islami (HuJI). The email also mentioned that the attack was an act of retribution by Muslims in India to protest against the pogroms conducted against them in Gujarat in 2002 and in 1992-93 in Mumbai. 

The Indian Mujahideen may not a particular group, but may be referring to Indian Muslims in general. An interesting aspect is the fact that the email denies involvement of the Indian Mujahideen in the Malegaon attack in September 2006, and the Samjhauta Express and Mecca Masjid blasts in 2007. 

Some analysts feel that the language in the email is similar to the language of the literature produced by the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) thus indicating a domestic connection. At a 2000 convention in Mumbai, the SIMI leaders had called on their cadres to participate in ‘jihad’ against India. Thus, two lines of thinking dominate the analysis of the attack.

Hyderabad blast

19 May 2007

A twin casualty incident took place in the city of Hyderabad on 19 May 2007, when the city was struck by terrorist attack killing 11 people and 5 more were killed in police firing after attacks.

A bomb blast at a mosque in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad that left 16 dead and at least 100 injured was a planned terrorist attack. A powerful bomb exploded at the 400-year-old Medina mosque in the old quarters of the Andhra Pradesh capital during Friday prayers.

Eleven people were killed in the explosion and five in police firing on an angry mob that gathered outside the mosque after the incident, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YSR Reddy said at a joint press briefing with Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil. According to C.M. YRS Reddy 56 people were injured in the blast and compensation was announced for the injured and relatives of the dead.

Locals, angered over the explosion at one of the oldest and most revered places of worship in the city, pelted police and media personnel with stones after the blast.

A police official said the 100 or so personnel on duty at the mosque were forced to open fire after they failed to control the mob with teargas shells and baton charges.

The situation in the old quarters of Hyderabad was reported to be largely peaceful but tense Saturday with sporadic incidents of violence in some parts of the capital and other towns.

Most streets in Hyderabad wore a deserted look as people kept inside their homes following the incident and a day-long strike call given by a local Islamic organization.

The state-owned Road Transport Corporation was not operating buses as a precautionary measure. Hundreds of policemen and paramilitary personnel was deployed in sensitive areas of the city.

There were reports of demonstrations from some towns in the state with size able Muslim populations. Hindus joined Muslims in rallies to protest against the blast. Black flags could be seen on several streets in Hyderabad, where Muslims comprise about 40 per cent of the city's 4 million population.

The police found some important clues to the attack including mobile-phone SIM cards attached to the two unexploded devices found in the mosque premises soon after the blast. Both devices were defused by bomb disposal squads, averting a larger tragedy, city police chief Balwinder Singh said.

There were about 8,000 worshippers in the mosque at the time of the explosion. The recovered explosive devices contained RDX and some other highly explosive material packed in steel containers connected to mobile phones. The blast was possibly triggered by a call to a similar phone in the third device. The recovered SIM cards could provide vital leads

The Hyderabad blast comes nine months after a similar attack at a mosque in the western town of Malegaon left 37 people dead.
Indian police suspect Hindu and Muslim fundamentalist outfits of being behind the attacks on mosques and temples that are reported at regular intervals.

Security agencies said such attacks were carried out to trigger communal tension in India, which has a history of religious violence between Hindus and Muslims. These attacks were closely related to Malegaon blasts in Maharashtra as the target areas in both cases were having large Muslim population.

Samjhauta Express blast

19 February 2007

Samjhauta Express, train which became the hope for beginning of a new era between the two countries India and Pakistan was hit by a massive attack on 19 February 2007, 63 people, including some Pakistani nationals, were killed in explosions believed to have been set off by IEDs in two coaches of the Delhi-Attari special train for Lahore in Deewana near Panipat, about 100 kms from Delhi.

Several people were also injured in the incident, which the Northern Railway said was a clear case of sabotage. The explosions in the train took place at 11:55 pm last night. The bi-weekly train left the Old Delhi Railway Station at 10:40 pm . 

Northern Railway General Manger V N Mathur, who reached the spot from Delhi, told reporters that two suitcases were recovered from the spot, one from the rail track and one from the train. Both the suitcases contained IEDs one of them also had incendiary material, either kerosene or petrol, he said.

The two coaches, where all the deaths took place, were completely gutted and only the charred remains were visible. After detaching those two coaches, the rest of the train left for Attari via Wagah. The official said Shamshuddin, the Pak national, was travelling in the train. Two Railway Protection Force (RPF) personnel, who were on duty in the two compartments were missing, he said adding that it was suspected that they could be among the dead. 

The train runs non-stop from Delhi to Attari where the passengers are shifted to the Samjhauta Express, which goes to Lahore after customs and immigration clearances. The train only has operational halts at some stations, including Ludhiana and no passenger can alight or board it en rooted. 

The matter was not limited only to the Indian territory but also to Pakistan hence the blast was taken very seriously but it also showed the loopholes in security provided to the train.

Malegaon blasts

8 September 2006

After the serial blast in Mumbai local trains Malegaon in maharashtra became the next point of blast. Terrorists struck, killing 38 people and injuring over 100 in three blasts including one in a mosque in the communally sensitive Muslim-dominated town of Malegaon.

The blasts occurred just before 2:00 pm at three different places, nearly simultaneously leaving a trail of death and destruction. Scores of people who had gathered in a mosque-cum-graveyard for Friday prayers were among the casualties.

Malegaon, which has a history of communal violence, was under curfew as the central and the state governments rushed paramilitary forces to deal with the situation officially described as tense but under control. The explosions came less than two months after train blasts in Mumbai killed nearly 200 people on July 11. **They occurred only four days prior to the verdict in the 1993 Mumbai blasts case due on Tuesday.

Besides the mosque-cum-graveyard where people had come to pray for the dead on the occasion of Shab-e-Barat, the blasts also rocked the busy Mushaira Chowk and Ayesha Nagar locality. 

Around 37 people were killed in the three explosions. A near-stampede broke out immediately after the blasts as devotees, including children, rushed out of the narrow gate in panic with many of them trampling over the dead bodies and those seriously injured.

Local officials said that over 100 people injured in the blasts were rushed to the Wadia Hospital and other hospitals in the town while some of the seriously wounded were moved to Nashik, about 100km from Malegaon. The devotees also helped the injured rush to nearby hospitals on every available mode of transport including pushcarts.

According to Maharashtra's Director General of Police P S Pasricha, it was too early to link the Malegaon blasts with the Mumbai serial bomb blasts of July 11 or the earlier explosions at Nanded and Parbhani, which happened last year. Mobile networks remained jammed in Malegaon and Nasik, similar to the situation that developed after the blasts on July 11. National Bomb Data Centre team of the elite National Security Guard rushed to the spot to confirm the nature of explosives used. Although there was deployment of paramilitary forces in strength in the town owing to the recently concluded Ganesh festival and the Shab-e-barat ceremony, police found it difficult to reach the site of the blasts.

Angry residents pelted stones on policemen and prevented them from reaching the blasts site while a mob of nearly 500 persons laid a siege of Azadnagar police station

Mumbai Serial Train Blast

11 July 2006

Mumbai serial blast was the worst case sinario in the history of serial blasts in india on july 11, 2006 series of seven explosions killed at least 174 people on crowded commuter trains and stations Tuesday evening in the Indian financial capital of Mumbai.

At least 464 people were injured in the blasts in the city's western suburbs as commuters made their way home. All seven blasts came within an 11-minute span, between 6:24 and 6:35 p.m. (12:54 and 1:05 p.m. GMT). Analysts compared these attack with the mass transit bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London last year, saying they all involved a series of mutiple blasts and were well-coordinated.

There was some confusion about the number of dead and injured as information was compiled from hospitals and explosion sites in Mumbai, the west Indian seaport previously called Bombay.

People started running helter-skelter and started jumping from the train. The first-class compartment was totally ripped apart and people were hanging from the train. There are some people who were thrown out from the train and they were lying on the track, bleeding completely.

One person was arrested in New Delhi in police raids after the explosions, but there was no claim of responsibility for the attacks. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh urged calm and said the attacks were "shocking and cowardly attempts to spread a feeling of fear and terror." "I reiterate our commitment to fighting terror in all its forms," he said in a written statement.

Both the 2005 London bombings and the 2004 Madrid bombings, that killed 191 people, were directed against rush hour commuters on mass transit systems. It was a coordinated, multiple, simultaneous mass casualty atrocity. This is the hallmark of a powerful transnational group.

These attacks targeted a first-class commuter car, and police were looking at that carriage to see if it might yield clues. The names of those aboard would have been known beforehand as opposed to regular computers.

The blasts hit trains or platforms at the Khar, Mahim, Matunga, Jogeshwari, Borivili and Bhayander stations. The seventh explosion struck a train between the Khar and Santacruz stations. Police also found and defused another bomb at the Borivili station. Video footage from a train station showed people in bloodstained clothes receiving medical treatment, while others were carrying victims and some lying motionless near railroad tracks. Windows of a train appeared to be spattered with blood. At least one train was split in half. 

People jumped and were killed as the train hit them. Limbs were lying everywhere, bodies were cleared from the tracks by local business owners who rushed from their shops. People living almost two miles (three kilometers) away from the Borivili station said they heard the blast.

The Western Railway system which 4.5 million people use daily was shut down and Mumbai's subway system put on high alert after the blasts. Police in the capital of New Delhi also heightened security. Airports across India were put on high alert, too. U.S. officials said the blasts followed a pattern of initiated by the two main Islamic Kashmiri separatist terrorist groups.

Indian Home Minister Shivraj Patil said the government had some advance knowledge that such an attack might take place. "What we didn't have was the place and the time," Patil said.

Jama Masjid blast

14 April 2006

Two Blast rocked delhi when the blast took place in two explosions that took place in quick succession inside the historic Jama Masjid in Old Delhi when the devout were offering prayers on Friday evening.

This was the first blast which took inside a historic monument. On account of Babasaheb Ambedkar's birth anniversary, a large number of people were present in the complex at the time of the explosion.

Fifteen minutes later, another blast rocked the place, Since it was prayer time, not many people were present at the spot where the twin blasts took place, A large number of worshippers who have gathered were agitated about the blasts and are refused to go away.

Syed Ahmed Bukhari, the shahi imam of Jama Masjid, appealed to the people to maintain communal harmony and to defeat the designs of those who want to disrupt the peaceful co-existence between Hindus and Muslims. "About eight hundred devotees were praying in the masjid when the first blast took place. That was around 5.25 in the evening. He ordered the immediate closure of all the gates of the Jama Masjid so that the police could look out for any other bomb that be hidden somewhere else. This was the first time that Jama Masjid was targetted by the militants.

Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit announced that Rs 20,000 be given as compensation to those injured in the blasts.Home Minister Shivraj Patil, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Delhi Lt Governor B L Joshi and Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit visited the injured at the hospital. Undeterred by the explosions, devout went back to the mosque about one-and-half hours later to offer prayer.The Delhi police, which cordoned off the area and diverted traffic to other routes, has declared a red alert in the capital.

Meanwhile, an alert was sounded at many places, including Mumbai. Security in places of worship in Mumbai was enhanced and a high alert sounded following the explosions.

Varanasi Serial Blast

7 March 2006

Serial blasts in India can be said as the worst thing which has affected the country in recent past, March 7, 2006 blast in Varanasi can be said as the real begnning which has no ends. This time targeting the holy city of Varanasi. On a busy Tuesday evening of 7 March 2006, devotees had gathered (more in number as it was a Tuesday) as usual for the evening aarti in the Sankatmochan Temple in Varanasi.

At 6:15 pm a bomb blast inside the temple premises changed the scenario completely. The area was covered with human blood and flesh. The injured were rushed to the nearby hospitals. The blast resulted in panic and near stampede situation. The bomb was kept in the pressure cooker cartoon.

Minutes later, at the Varanasi Railway Station in the Cantonment Area another blast shook the city. It exploded on platform number 1 when the Delhi bound train Shivganga Express was stationary.

A third bomb exploded on a running train at Lohata Railway Station at 8:30 pm, 25 km away from Varanasi.

Four more bombs were recovered at Dashaswamedh Ghat, 2 km away from the Sankatmochan Temple. But they were diffused in time. Initial investigations indicated that high density plastic bombs have been used in triggering the blast. The modus operandi of the blasts were similar to the Delhi blasts. As safety measure, red alert was sounded in Uttar Pradesh and in the various parts of the country. This was the second major terrorist strike in Uttar Pradesh in less than one year. The UP Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav has announced an ex-gratia of Rs. 5 lakh, Rs.1 lakh and Rs. 50,000 to those killed, seriously injured and with minor injury respectively.