INDIA:POLICE CONDUCTED raids across India's capital New Delhi yesterday, detaining around a dozen suspects reportedly involved in Saturday's blasts in the city's crowded markets that killed 21 people and wounded 91 others.
Officials said the police were pursuing "several leads" including talking to an 11-year-old balloon seller who claimed to have seen two men dressed in black drop off a large plastic bag containing a bomb on Saturday evening near the upmarket Connaught Place plaza, minutes before it exploded.
Police said the co-ordinated series of low-intensity ammonium nitrate bombs, packed with steel ball bearings, nails and glass to cause maximum damage, were hidden in dust bins.
Five of them exploded within 30 minutes of each other in a park and market places crowded with shoppers ahead of the impending Hindu festive season.
Two unexploded bombs were recovered and defused, providing forensic clues to investigators.
Saturday's attack revived memories of a similar serial bombing that rocked one of Delhi's popular market places three years ago, killing 59 people on the eve of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights.
The little-known Indian Mujahideen terrorist group claimed responsibility for the bombings in an e-mail sent to several television stations minutes before the explosions occurred.
"In the name of Allah, Indian Mujahideen strikes back once more . . . Do whatever you can. Stop us if you can," said the 13-page message entitled "Eye for an Eye: The dust will never settle down".
It stated that the bombings were revenge for Hindu zealots demolishing the 16th-century Babri mosque in north India in 1992 to build a temple to their god Lord Rama whose exact birth place they claimed it was.
"Our intense, accurate and successive attacks . . . will continue to punish you even before your earlier wounds have healed," the Mujahideen message said.
Believed to be an offshoot of the banned Students' Islamic Movement of India, the group had sent similar e-mails minutes ahead of the bombings that ripped through the tourist city of Jaipur in May, killing 61 people, and Ahmedabad in western Gujarat state two months later, claiming 45 lives.
"The challenge posed by terrorism and communalism will be fought tooth and nail," prime minister Manmohan Singh declared, but few were convinced about his government's capacity to combat terrorist strikes across India that have claimed over 400 lives since 2005.
At the city's hospitals relatives of the injured victims accused police of failing to protect them.
"Down with the police," they shouted. "We don't trust you any more."
"Bombings have become a commonplace phenomenon across India," retired Maj Gen Sheru Thapliyal said. "The state has become ineffective," he added.
According to the US National Counterterrorism Centre in Washington, terrorist-related attacks had claimed 3,674 lives in India between January 2004 and March 2007, a death toll second only to that of Iraq.