Seven explosions ripped through commuter trains and stations during evening rush hour in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, on Tuesday, killing at least 163 people in an attack the police and prime minister blamed on terrorists.
Train cars packed with commuters were blown apart and television images showed ghastly footage of bloodied limbs and dead bodies in the wreckage. It was one of the worst such attacks in India in recent years.
Police said at least 163 were killed and 464 injured in the attacks in Mumbai, a sprawling city of almost 18-million people and the capital of the state of Maharashtra.
Suspicion immediately fell on Islamists who have been fighting Indian rule in the disputed Kashmir, part of which is held by Pakistan, where eight tourists were earlier killed in a series of grenade attacks.
”Obviously a terrorist outfit is behind the blasts because a normal human being could not have done this,” said Mumbai police Commissioner AN Roy. Neighbouring Pakistan condemned what it called a ”despicable act of terrorism”.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called for calm after an emergency meeting at his official residence.
”We will work to defeat the evil designs of terrorists and will not allow them to succeed,” he said. ”The government will take all possible measures to maintain law and order and defeat the forces of terrorism.”
Indian authorities sounded a high alert across the capital, New Delhi, at trains and bus stands in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, and in the disputed state of Kashmir, where an Islamic insurgency has been raging for 16 years.
The apparently coordinated blasts occurred at packed railway stations or on trains in the Matunga, Khar, Mahim, Jogeshwari, Borivali and Bhayendar localities in and around Mumbai, police said. A seventh hit a subway.
The explosions took place within about 20 minutes of each other on Mumbai’s packed trains that take several millions to and from work every day.
”The blast was so powerful that we thought we were hit by lightning. It shook our market,” said shopkeeper Gopi Chand, who witnessed the blast in Khar.
Television footage showed dazed commuters with blood dripping from gaping wounds being carried by fellow travellers to waiting ambulances near Mahim station. Others frantically tried to call their relatives on cellphones.
One young man sat in a metro station with blood streaming down his face. Another young man buried his face into a white handkerchief and wept.
People who were unhurt scrambled off trains and streamed down the tracks to safety.
”People began jumping off our running train when a bomb went off and filled the carriage with smoke and fire,” said a commuter with serious injuries to his left arm and shoulder.
The injured were helped out of the mangled compartments, many of which were turned into piles of twisted metal.
Shoes, handbags, clothes and other items littered tracks. Bodies were sprawled on the tracks and being carried in sheets away from the trains.
Firemen scoured the wreckage of a train hit in Matunga rail station. Police said the blasts had occurred on first-class carriages of the commuter trains.
Ambulances and taxis ferried the injured to the city’s hard-pressed hospitals amid reports of some shortages of blood and medicine.
One doctor, Supriya Kulkarni, said: ”We’ve got all kinds of traumatic injuries, some lost limbs. We’ve amputated some [limbs] and people have lost a lot of blood.”
Mumbai has seen several bombings in the past. It was rocked in 1993 by a series of blasts that killed about 250 people and injured more than 1 000.
Police have blamed Muslim underground figures or Kashmiri militants for most of the attacks.
The blasts drew swift condemnation from nations around the world, including Britain, Russia, Spain and the United States, which have suffered attacks on their own soil.
”I condemn utterly these brutal and shameful attacks. There can never be any justification for terrorism,” British Prime Minister Tony Blair said.
”We stand united with India, as the world’s largest democracy, through our shared values and our shared determination to defeat terrorism in all its forms,” he said.
‘They’ve been destroyed’
Hours after the train blasts, ambulances were still racing to one of Mumbai’s busiest hospitals with what seemed to be an endless number of the injured and the dead.
”I’ve been here for hours taking the bodies inside. Some of them have no eyes, no hands, no arms,” said Bunty Jain (24), a shopkeeper who had joined the chaotic throng outside state-run Kem hospital to help push wheeled stretchers. ”They’ve been destroyed.”
Hundreds of onlookers, helpers and staff descended on the hospital in the early evening while taxis, emergency crews and private cars ferried those injured by the train blasts for treatment.
Many of the volunteers donned disposable gloves to help the wounded on to one of the many stretchers under the sporadic rain.
Others wearing plastic capes hosed the blood off them afterwards as they awaited the next arrivals that continued to trickle in more than three hours after the first blasts.
A crescendo of shouting greeted every vehicle arriving, and men clustered around the back doors as they pulled to a halt. The helpers rushed for wheelchairs and the stretchers, pushing them past scaffolding at the front of the hospital.
Medics in the backs of ambulances waved the people back as one patient was lifted swiftly on to a stretcher, with a helper holding a drip above the body as he was wheeled past a line of people into the hospital.
Police struggled to keep a gap into the hospital for them to go inside.
A woman, heavily pregnant but not obviously injured, walked slowly into the hospital accompanied by another woman and a man with a red towel wrapped around his wounded arm.
Over a loudspeaker, volunteers read out the names of the 30 injured people who had been brought to the hospital. Six names were also written on a blackboard.
Anxious relatives clustered around the little hut, shouting out the names of those they believed may have been brought in.
”We’re helping them with minor treatment out here,” said Jyoti Chavan, a worker from another hospital who lives nearby and had come in to help. ”Ambulances have been coming in and out all evening. They’ve also been coming in taxis. People are bringing them in wherever they are finding them. These blasts were so large.”
Inside, doctors rushed around while sheets blocked some of those being treated from sight. One stretcher was wheeled in, a white sheet covering the body of the patient beneath.
Outside the gates, men stood in the streets ensuring a free passage for the ambulances as they roared up the road of Mumbai’s usually traffic-clogged streets.
And with cellphones blocked, short lines formed at Mumbai’s pay-telephone booths to tell relatives of what had happened.
Officials reported some shortages of blood and medicines at Sion municipal hospital in the city because of the scale of the disaster
”We’re rushing senior police staff to tackle the situation there,” said Maharashtra state official DK Sankaran. — AFP
