Police have arrested three people and are investigating whether local militants received help from other terrorist groups in carrying out coordinated attacks that killed at least 77 people in India’s troubled northeast, officials said.
Two people were taken into custody on Saturday because their vehicles — a car and a motorcycle — are believed to have been used in two of the 13 blasts that rocked Assam state on Thursday, said Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta, a state inspector-general of police.
Police also arrested Nazir Ahmed, whose cellphone was allegedly used by a little-known group to send a text message to television station News Live claiming responsibility for the attacks, Mahanta said.
PHOTO: AP
R. Chandranathan, another state inspector-general of police, said the group, calling itself the Islamic Security Force (Indian Mujahadeen), also thanked its partners in the text message and warned of future attacks.
Chandranathan, who is heading the police investigation, said the group came into existence in 2000 mainly to thwart attacks by Bodo tribespeople on Muslim settlers in Assam state, but that nothing had been heard of it since then.
Police were unaware of the group’s activities and were trying to identify the partners mentioned in the message, he said.
The name echoes that of the Indian Mujahideen, a group unknown until May when it said it was behind bombings in Jaipur that killed 61 people. It also claimed responsibility for blasts in the western state of Gujarat in July that killed at least 45, and blasts in New Delhi in September that killed 21.
Police have said the state’s largest separatist group, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), is the main target of the investigation, but a spokesman for the ULFA has denied the group had any role in the blasts.
ULFA is one of the largest and most feared of several dozen militant groups active in the region, having launched dozens of attacks since it took up arms in 1979.
Most of the groups want independent homelands in India’s northeast, an isolated region wedged between Bangladesh, Bhutan, China and Myanmar with only a thin corridor connecting it to the rest of India. Its residents are ethnically closer to Myanmar and China than India.
The region has also seen repeated violence between indigenous tribes and migrants from other parts of India. Last year, militants massacred about 70 migrant workers from northern India, and last month more than 50 people were killed in violence between members of the Bodo tribe and mostly Muslim migrants.
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