Two people were killed and 10 injured yesterday in a bomb attack at a crowded marketplace in India's northeastern state of Assam, police said.
Police said the outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), a rebel group fighting for an independent Assamese homeland since 1979, was behind the attack in Guwahati, the capital of Assam.
"The impact of the blast was so powerful that it ripped apart four motorcycles parked in the area," a senior police official said, saying the bomb was planted on a parked motorcycle.
Assam has been rocked by a string of bomb attacks in recent weeks. The ULFA was also blamed for a series of ethnic attacks in January that killed 80 people, mainly Hindi-speaking migrant workers.
Meanwhile, two groups of ethnic protesters battled each other with bows and arrows, machetes and stones in Assam on Sunday, leaving four people dead and more than a dozen injured, officials said yesterday.
Violence erupted when a group of Indian tea plantation workers, armed with traditional bows and arrows, attacked hundreds of ethnic Assamese demonstrators, who had been blocking a main highway for more than a week to protest an army killing.
"The tea plantation workers were apparently agitated after their estates began running out of food and medicine supplies due to the highway blockade," said Absar Hazarika, a senior government official in the Tinsukia region where the clashes took place.
Tinsukia is some 550km east of Gauhati.
Police said a plantation worker and three Assamese protesters were killed in the clashes. Police later separated the groups by firing tear gas and rubber bullets, a senior police official said.
Hundreds of local Assamese have blocked the highway linking Assam with Arunachal Pradesh state since May 6 after army troops searching for separatist insurgents shot and killed a local youth saying he was a militant. However, locals said he was an innocent civilian.
At the heart of the dispute is a simmering resentment by the indigenous people, most of whom are ethnically closer to Myanmar and China than to the rest of India, against the federal government in New Delhi and ethnic Indians who have migrated to Assam over the centuries.
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