By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 2, 2008

NEW DELHI, Dec. 2 -- In the latest attack to roil India, a bomb exploded in a passenger train in the northeastern state of Assam, killing at least 10 people and injuring 23, some of them seriously.

The blast occurred in a remote area early Tuesday when the train arrived at the Diphu station in the hill district of Karbi Anglong, 200 miles south of Gauhati, Assam's capital.

"The explosion ripped apart the carriage, with people tossed in the air after the blast," Vishal Kumar, a witness, told India's CNN-IBN television station. Kumar was waiting to board another train to Gauhati.

The blast comes just days after suspected Muslim extremists rampaged through the city of Mumbai, killing at least 174 people and injuring more than 300. For now, investigators say the blasts in Mumbai and Assam appear unrelated.

Assam is a restive state in the foothills of the Himalayas. A number of insurgent groups have a history of attacking the railways, seen as an easy target likely to cause many causalities. None of the rebel groups active in Assam has asserted responsibility for the explosion. Police say they suspect that the Karbi Longri National Liberation Front was involved. The group is fighting for an independent homeland for the Karbi tribes in Assam.

Assam police chief G.M. Srivastava told the BBC that the death toll could soar and that the condition of those injured was "pretty bad." On Oct. 30, a series of nine explosions in four towns killed more than 84 people and injured 500. The state government blamed the separatist United Liberation Front of Assam and the National Democratic Front of Bodoland for the explosions.

In the past few months, India has been bit by blasts in major cities such as New Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Jaipur, Hyderabad and, most recently, Mumbai, which have killed more than 500 people.

But, unlike in the northeast, Muslim militants have been blamed for those explosions.