Organized Blasts Hit Tech Hub Of India

2 Killed, 20 Injured In Bangalore Attack

NEW DELHI, July 25 -- At least seven small blasts tore through India's high-tech hub of Bangalore on Friday afternoon, killing two people and injuring at least 20 in the second high-profile attack on an Indian city in 10 weeks.

No group asserted responsibility for the coordinated bombings, which exploded along highways, outside markets, at a bus stop and on a residential street. While initial reports said seven blasts occurred over a period of 15 minutes, authorities later were quoted as saying there were as many as nine explosions.

India has seen a wave of bombings in recent years. Many of them, while blamed on Islamist groups in Pakistan and Bangladesh, remain unsolved.

The bombs in Bangalore were relatively unsophisticated devices stuffed with nuts and bolts, the city's police commissioner, Shankar M. Bidari, told reporters at one bomb site. He said it was unclear whether the attacks were orchestrated by "local miscreants or were part of a larger pattern of terrorist attacks."

"In all these cases, they have created the blast using timer devices," Bidari said. "They were small bombs and were only the equivalent of one or two grenades."

A woman was killed by one of the bombs while waiting at a bus stop in the neighborhood of Madiwala, Bidari said. A second person, described as a day laborer, was killed in the same blast, according to a report on India's main news channel.

Television images showed a crater in a road, broken windows at markets and bomb squads stepping through shattered glass in Bangalore, a city that is known both as India's Silicon Valley and "the world's back office," because of the large number of jobs outsourced there.

Activity in the normally bustling city screeched to a stop, as thousands of worried onlookers clogged the streets. Schools, malls and cinemas closed after news of the explosions spread. Cellphones jammed, and parents said their children were stuck in traffic jams as they tried to get home from school.

"I was driving to the airport and there was total panic, with people calling and asking loved ones -- 'Are you okay? Are you okay?' " said Sayed Zacharia, a taxi driver who was near one of the blast sites. "Everyone heard ringing in their ears and fear in their minds."

It was the second coordinated bombing attack on a popular Indian city in as many months. In May, the pink-walled city of Jaipur in northwestern India was rocked by a series of simultaneous blasts that killed more than 83 people and seriously wounded more than 200. That attack was India's deadliest since train bombings that killed nearly 200 people in Mumbai in July 2006.

On Friday, Sonia Gandhi, president of the ruling Congress party, condemned the Bangalore blasts, calling them "a cowardly act."

But the right-leaning Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) placed blame with the government, accusing the ruling party of being soft on terrorism and slamming it for overturning a controversial 2002 law known as the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

The law, which gave the government a free hand to arrest and collect information on any person or business suspected of involvement in terrorist activities, was enacted by the then-ruling BJP months after the Indian Parliament was attacked in December 2001. In 2004, with the Congress party in power, the government repealed the law, saying it violated civil rights.

Friday's bombings prompted renewed calls by lawmakers and anti-terrorism activists for the government to form a single agency to coordinate investigations.

"A stronger law . . . would help. But we also really need to find out if there is a central brain behind all of these bombs," said B. Raman, a retired high-ranking Indian intelligence officer. "For that, we ourselves need a central brain to investigate them. In India, people have been demanding this for a long time, and political parties have not done this."

Correspondent Rama Lakshmi contributed to this report.