Indian police yesterday were investigating if the sole unclaimed body from the Mumbai train attacks was a bomber after a little-known group said a member of a 16-strong terror team was killed in the operation.
Police have cast doubt on a claim of responsibility by Lashkar-e-Qahhar for the well-planned attacks on July 11 that killed 182 and wounded more than 800. The group said it would provide video evidence to back up its claims.
"One body is unidentified lying in the morgue. We don't know if he is one of the terrorists, so we're investigating," additional commissioner of police Jayjit Singh said.
The group warned of further attacks on historic and government sites in India in an e-mail sent to the private Aaj Tak television network late on Monday.
"We are Muslims, we never tell lie," said the e-mail in badly written English and signed by Abu Mahaz who claimed to be a spokesman for the group.
It said a member of the team had died but "all the remaining 15 mujahideens are totally safe, and celebrating the success of this mission and also preparing for the next mission."
It accused the government of "exploiting" Muslims but did not go into detail. Experts have cast doubt on the e-mail because it was sent under the name of "John Smith" -- a name unlikely to be used by Islamic militants.
Police have traced the e-mail to the city of Indore in central Madhya Pradesh Province, according to the Press Trust of India, quoting an unnamed senior police official.
"It is most likely to be an Internet cafe and we will have to find out if the sender could be identified," the official said, but did not rule out that it was a hoax.
Singh blamed "hooligans" for the e-mail, the second from the group after a claim of responsibility on Saturday, and said officers were treating its claims with caution.
The group, whose name roughly translates as "Army of the Imperious," first came to public prominence when it claimed responsibility for a triple bombing on India's holiest city of Varanasi that killed more than 20 people.
But police at the time dismissed the claim of responsibility as a smokescreen and pinned blame on one or other of the two main pro-Pakistan militant groups Jaish-e-Mohammed or Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Police said the Mumbai blasts bore all the hallmarks of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, with help from local Islamist militants. But they were still investigating who was behind the attacks.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema