Rail Attack in India Kills Scores

DEWANA, India, Feb. 19 -- An explosion on a train headed for Pakistan set off a fire that swept through two cars and killed at least 65 people in an attack that a government minister said was aimed at undermining the peace process between India and Pakistan.

Authorities said two suitcases packed with unexploded crude bombs and gasoline were found in cars not hit in the attack, leading them to suspect the fire was set off by an identical explosive device.

"This is an act of sabotage," Railway Minister Lalu Prasad said.

India's junior Home Minister, Sriprakash Jaiswal, said the homemade bombs were not powerful, and were simply intended to start a fire on the train, one day before Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri was to arrive in New Delhi for talks on the ongoing peace process.

Jaiswal called the attack part of a "conspiracy . . . to disturb the peace process between India and Pakistan" and destabilize India.

Prasad made a similar accusation, blaming the attack on militants. "Whoever is behind it will be caught and punished," he told the Press Trust of India news agency.

Indian security forces were put on alert after the fire. Police swarmed many stations, but train service continued.

People who live near the tracks rushed to the train with buckets of water soon after the fire broke out. The blaze was eventually extinguished after fire engines arrived.

The fire engulfed two cars of the Samjhauta Express, one of two train links between India and Pakistan. Because of security concerns, the train is kept sealed -- with locked doors and barred windows in the lower-class coaches -- from New Delhi to the border. Passengers may have been trapped inside the burning cars.

The explosion and fire struck just before the train reached the station in the village of Dewana, about 50 miles north of New Delhi.

At least 30 passengers who were burned or injured in the blaze have been hospitalized in the nearby town of Panipat, Mathur said.

The dead included both Indians and Pakistanis, officials said.

The train was traveling from New Delhi to Atari, the last railroad station before the border with Pakistan. At Atari, passengers switch to a train that takes them to the Pakistani city of Lahore.

The train links are one of the most visible results of the peace process under way between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan, and one of the easiest ways to travel across the militarized border.

The enmity between India and Pakistan centers on Kashmir, a largely Muslim Himalayan region divided between the two countries but claimed by both.

More than a dozen militant groups -- most based in Pakistan -- have been fighting in Indian Kashmir for nearly two decades, seeking independence for the region or its merger with predominantly Islamic Pakistan.