At least four bombs exploded in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad yesterday, killing at least one person, just a day after another set of coordinated blasts in the country’s southern IT hub, police said.
The Press Trust of India news agency said six explosions occurred while police reported that one blast occurred at a diamond-trading market in Ahmedabad, the commercial capital of Gujarat state.
The reports came a day after eight low-intensity bombs went off in the high-tech southern Indian city of Bangalore, leaving one dead and seven wounded.
The Times Now news television network said at least 27 people were injured in one of the attacks in Ahmedabad.
Other television stations said the explosives were on bicycles and detonated with remote devices.
Police said that the first explosion was reported at around 6pm on a bridge in Ahmedabad, a communally sensitive city that saw bloody Hindu-Muslim riots in 2002.
“All the explosions occurred within a span of one hour and one of the bombs appeared to have been kept in a passenger bus,” a police control room spokesman said.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh condemned the serial attack and urged Ahmedabad residents to remain calm, his office said in new Delhi.
Yesterday’s blasts were in the Ahmedabad’s crowded old city dominated by its Muslim community.
“According to information so far, there have been four to five blasts,” said a duty officer at the police control room in Ahmedabad, who was not authorized to give his name. “We have heard one person is dead.”
So far, police said they had few leads into Friday’s Bangalore bombings.
Another unexploded bomb was found yesterday near a shopping mall in Bangalore, but it was unclear whether the bomb was newly planted or meant to have exploded during Friday’s attacks, police said.
“Special squads have been formed to find out who is behind the blasts,” Bangalore’s Additional Commissioner of Police M.R. Pujar said yesterday.
India has suffered a wave of bombings in recent years, with targets ranging from mosques and Hindu temples to trains. It is unusual for any group to claim responsibility for attacks.
RSS