Deadly Bombs Strike India's West

Attack Came Day After Similar Blasts in South

NEW DELHI, July 26 -- At least 29 people were killed and 88 injured when as many as 16 small blasts tore through the western city of Ahmedabad on Saturday evening. It was the second synchronized bomb attack in India in two days.

The coordinated, low-intensity blasts occurred outside a diamond market, near a hospital, next to a railway station and inside a bus, a day after at least seven small explosions killed two people in the southern technology hub of Bangalore. There were no leads in the investigation in Bangalore, a cosmopolitan city known as India's Silicon Valley.

"The blasts seem to be along the lines of yesterday's Bangalore blasts," the minister of state for home affairs, Sriprakash Jaiswal, told reporters. "It is a conspiracy to unsettle the country. All metros are on a high alert."

In Ahmedabad, television images showed windows of buses and storefronts blown out. A red car under which a bomb had been placed was shown in flames outside the hospital. Police sealed the city's main railway station. Indian news media reported that several of the bombs were hidden in metal lunchboxes.

Some of the blasts took place in communally sensitive areas. Gujarat state, where Ahmedabad is located, endured sectarian rioting by Hindus and Muslims in 2002 that left an estimated 1,000 Muslims dead and thousands of homes and businesses burned across the region.

Saturday's first explosion, of a bomb planted on a bicycle, occurred at 6:40 p.m. in Maninagar, an area in the southern part of the city at the heart of the constituency of Gujarat's controversial chief minister, Narendra Modi.

Modi, from the right-leaning Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had angered the state's Muslims, who have joined human rights groups in accusing him of complicity in the 2002 sectarian riots.

India's president, Pratibha Patil, blamed the explosions on those who wish to fuel communal hostilities, and she urged civic leaders to try to maintain peace.

India's Intelligence Bureau announced that earlier Saturday it had received an e-mail from a little-known terrorist group called Indian Mujaheddin about a possible attack.

A similar message was received in May when 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. The Jaipur bombings remain unsolved.

India has experienced a wave of bombings in recent years targeting mosques, markets, trains and temples. Many of the attacks remain unsolved, despite being blamed on Islamist groups in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Modi's BJP has accused India's ruling Congress party of being soft on terrorism, criticizing it for overturning a controversial 2002 law known as the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

"It looks like our anti-terror legal framework is not up to the mark, and it got exposed," a senior BJP leader, L.K. Advani, said Saturday.