One of three people critically wounded after a hand grenade was thrown by suspected separatist rebels into a crowded market in India's insurgency-wracked northeast has died, police said yesterday.
Friday's explosion was the second in Gauhati, the capital of Assam state, in the past three days. Two people were killed and another 14 wounded in a blast on Wednesday.
Assailants riding a motorbike lobbed the grenade into the market in the heart of Gauhati, where the separatist United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) has been waging a bloody battle for autonomy, said R.N. Mathur, the director-general of state police.
PHOTO: AP
"One person, who was critically wounded, died early Saturday," Rajen Singh, a top police official in Gauhati, said yesterday.
No individual or group has yet claimed responsibility for either explosion, although police suspect the ULFA, who are also believed to have been behind the killings of more than 60 people, most of them migrant laborers, earlier this month.
Meanwhile, the ULFA urged people in the state to boycott India's national day celebrations next week.
India's national Republic Day falls on Friday and marks the adoption of the country's constitution in 1950.
The ULFA and separatist groups in the neighboring states of Manipur and Tripura have called for a general strike on Friday.
The blasts in Gauhati followed a series of shootings and other attacks in the state that killed 61 Hindi-speaking migrants earlier this month.
Authorities blamed the ULFA for the killings and have launched a major hunt for their suspected hideouts in the state. ULFA has not claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Meanwhile, Assam's top elected official, Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi promised to protect Hindi-speaking migrants in the state and asked them to ignore threats by the ULFA.
"Assam is not just for the Assamese. Any Indian can live in Assam, just like any Assamese can live anywhere in India," Gogoi told journalists on Friday night.
Last week, the ULFA ordered all Hindi-speaking migrants in Assam to leave the state, threatening more attacks if they failed to comply.
The Jan. 5-8 killings were Assam's worst violence in years and came after Indian authorities called off peace talks with the ULFA and a six-week temporary truce in September, and resumed military offensives against the rebels.
At least 10,000 people in Assam, most of them civilians, have died over the last three decades in fighting between government forces and separatists.
The militants say the central government in New Delhi -- 1,600km to the west of Gauhati -- exploits the northeast's rich natural resources while ignoring the region's economy.
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
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
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of
RSS