India on high alert after bombs rock Mumbai

MUMBAI – At least 135 people were killed and hundreds injured in seven bomb explosions on packed commuter trains and stations during rush hour in Mumbai yesterday, India’s financial hub, officials said.

City police chief A.N. Roy told Reuters 135 people were killed while Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, the top elected official in the state, said 300 people were injured.”It is a bomb blast.We are not sure if it is RDX or not,” 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.Television pictures showed twisted rail carriages and people in bloodstained clothes carrying dead and wounded on stretchers.”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 least 40 people have died.Casualties probably will go up.Ambulances and hospitals are on stand-by.”There was no immediate claim of responsibility.But suspicion turned to Muslim militants fighting New Delhi’s rule in disputed Kashmir, who have been blamed for several bomb attacks in the country in the past.The blasts occurred throughout Mumbai’s western suburbs, which are linked to the downtown office and business areas mainly by the train network.”We have doused the flames at all the blast sites and now we are taking the injured to hospitals,” A.Jhandwal, Mumbai’s fire services chief told Reuters.Dazed survivors with wounds from injuries to heads, legs and hands waited at railway stations, with little sign of any emergency medical aid.One critically injured person lying near the railway tracks was carried away by people using a long sheet of cloth.”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.”Officials said five trains had been hit and two stations.”All suburban train services have been suspended and search operations are going on,” the chairman of India’s Railway Board, J.P.Batra, told reporters.Indian Prime Minister immediately called the home (interior) minister and other top officials to an emergency meeting to discuss the violence.”It is a sad day,” Home Secretary V.K.Duggal told reporters ahead of the meeting.”Security has been definitely put on high alert.”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.Mumbai, a metropolis of about 17 million which was formerly called Bombay, has been hit by a series of 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.Police in the Indian capital New Delhi said they were on the lookout for more violence.- Nampa-ReutersRoy told Reuters 135 people were killed while Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, the top elected official in the state, said 300 people were injured.”It is a bomb blast.We are not sure if it is RDX or not,” 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.Television pictures showed twisted rail carriages and people in bloodstained clothes carrying dead and wounded on stretchers.”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 least 40 people have died.Casualties probably will go up.Ambulances and hospitals are on stand-by.”There was no immediate claim of responsibility.But suspicion turned to Muslim militants fighting New Delhi’s rule in disputed Kashmir, who have been blamed for several bomb attacks in the country in the past.The blasts occurred throughout Mumbai’s western suburbs, which are linked to the downtown office and business areas mainly by the train network.”We have doused the flames at all the blast sites and now we are taking the injured to hospitals,” A.Jhandwal, Mumbai’s fire services chief told Reuters.Dazed survivors with wounds from injuries to heads, legs and hands waited at railway stations, with little sign of any emergency medical aid.One critically injured person lying near the railway tracks was carried away by people using a long sheet of cloth.”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.”Officials said five trains had been hit and two stations.”All suburban train services have been suspended and search operations are going on,” the chairman of India’s Railway Board, J.P.Batra, told reporters.Indian Prime Minister immediately called the home (interior) minister and other top officials to an emergency meeting to discuss the violence.”It is a sad day,” Home Secretary V.K.Duggal told reporters ahead of the meeting.”Security has been definitely put on high alert.”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.Mumbai, a metropolis of about 17 million which was formerly called Bombay, has been hit by a series of 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.Police in the Indian capital New Delhi said they were on the lookout for more violence.- Nampa-Reuters