By Muneeza Naqvi
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, July 11, 2006; 8:56 PM
NEW DELHI, July 11 -- At least seven powerful bombs detonated in commuter trains and stations during the Tuesday evening rush hour in Bombay, India's commercial capital, killing at least 142 people and wounding close to 350. Authorities called the explosions a coordinated terror attack.
In pouring monsoon rain, rescue workers helped dazed and bleeding survivors from rail cars that were left mangled by the quick succession of blasts, television images showed. Luggage and other debris littered the platforms; doors were blown off.
There was no immediate assertion of responsibility for the attacks, which appeared to focus on first-class carriages. Authorities have blamed previous terrorist strikes in Bombay on indigenous Muslim groups motivated by sectarian hatred.
"This is a painful incident. I see this as a part of a larger conspiracy," Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Maharashtra state, said on New Delhi Television channel. "The blasts occurred between 6 and 6:30 p.m. when the local trains are running at their busiest." Bombay, also called Mumbai, is the capital of Maharashtra.
The city's commuter rail system is one of the most heavily patronized in the world, carrying about 6 million people a day. The explosions, all along a single rail corridor in a western sector of the port city, caught passengers at very close quarters.
"It was a deafening sound and before anybody could realize anything the roof of the train was ripped apart," Mukund Thakur, who was traveling to the northern suburb of Andheri, told the Reuters news agency. "People were thrown outside. I saw limbs strewn around me."
Santosh Patil, a railway laborer, told the agency that "we collected scattered limbs with our own hands and put them in bundles and sent them to hospital." He was interviewed carrying a mangled body on a stretcher into a hospital.
The blasts came hours after a series of grenade attacks killed five Indian tourists and injured more than 30 other people in Srinagar, capital of the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir. Muslim insurgents have been fighting Indian authority there, seeking union with Pakistan, a Muslim-majority country.
India's rail systems and airports were put on high alert after the explosions in Bombay. Phone lines to Bombay from New Delhi, the Indian capital, were jammed.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called an emergency meeting Tuesday with his national security advisers to discuss the attacks.
"The series of blasts in Mumbai and in Kashmir are a shocking and cowardly attempt to spread fear and terror among all citizens. I condemn these shameful acts and I reiterate our commitment to fighting terror in all its forms," the prime minister said in a statement read by Home Minister Shivraj Patil.
Patil said that any possible links between the two attacks would be investigated.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed solidarity. "There is no political cause that can justify the murder of innocent people. The United States stands with India in the war against terror," Rice said. "Those responsible for these terrible acts should be swiftly brought to justice."
The FBI said Tuesday after the bombings that it saw "no specific or credible threat to the U.S. mass transportation system." Noting the Madrid transit bombings of March 2004, the London bombings of July 2005 and the recent disclosure of a potential plot against the New York City transportation system, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security "are assessing what has occurred in India," the statement said.
In 1993, more than a dozen bombs exploded in Bombay, killing 257 people and injuring hundreds. In 2002, another round of bombs killed 53 people and injured more than 150.
Both those attacks were blamed on indigenous Islamic terrorists and followed large-scale sectarian violence between the Hindu and Muslim communities. Indian investigators have also been looking into a possible link between those blasts and a wider ring of Islamic terrorism around the world.
India has often accused Pakistan of training and supporting Muslim radicals, especially in the Kashmir region, a charge Pakistan has denied. In 2001 India blamed Pakistan for an armed attack on Parliament in New Delhi and the two nuclear-armed neighbors came to the brink of war. They have since initiated a peace process aimed at resolving their competing claims over Kashmir.
Kashmir has been split between India and Pakistan since shortly after the two countries won independence from Britain in 1947, but both still claim it in full. India and Pakistan have fought three wars since the subcontinent was partitioned after independence, two of those over Kashmir.
On Tuesday, the Pakistani Foreign Ministry strongly condemned the Bombay attacks and it president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, offered condolences for the loss of life, the Associated Press reported.
Staff writers Robin Wright and Spencer S. Hsu in Washington contributed to this report.