By Muneeza Naqvi
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, July 12, 2006; A08
NEW DELHI, July 11 -- At least eight powerful bombs detonated in commuter trains and stations during the Tuesday evening rush hour in Bombay, India's commercial capital, killing at least 183 people and wounding more than 660. Authorities called the explosions a coordinated terrorist attack.
In monsoon rain, rescue workers helped dazed and bleeding survivors from rail cars that were mangled by the quick succession of blasts, television images showed. Train doors were blown off, and luggage and other debris littered the platforms.
There was no immediate assertion of responsibility for the attacks, which appeared to focus on first-class train cars. 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 in 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, said that "we collected scattered limbs with our own hands and put them in bundles and sent them to hospital," Reuters reported. Patil was interviewed carrying a body on a stretcher into a hospital.
The blasts came hours after a series of grenade attacks killed at least eight Indian tourists and injured more than 30 other people in Srinagar, summer capital of the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir. Muslim insurgents have been fighting Indian authorities 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.
In a statement, President Bush said the United States stands with India in the war on terrorism. "Such acts only strengthen the resolve of the international community to stand united against terrorism and to declare unequivocally that there is no justification for the vicious murder of innocent people," he said.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in a statement that his agency and other federal agencies were closely monitoring the Bombay bombings: "At this time, there is no specific or credible intelligence suggesting an imminent threat to the homeland or our transit systems. There are no plans to raise the nation's threat level as a result of this atrocious act. We will work with individual transit agencies that may choose to increase their vigilance, as a matter of prudence, at this time."
Bombay has experienced other terrorist attacks in recent years. In 1993, more than a dozen bombs exploded in Bombay, killing 257 people and injuring hundreds. In March 2003, a bomb killed 10 people on a passenger train. In August of that year, two taxis packed with explosives blew up near a busy city market, killing 52 and wounding more than 100.
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 Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, offered condolences over the loss of life, the Associated Press reported.
Staff writers Robin Wright and Spencer S. Hsu in Washington contributed to this report.