Three explosions within minutes, one at a street-side food stall and two in an amusement park, killed at least 34 people in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad on Saturday, police and officials said.
More than 50 people were wounded in the blasts in a city with a history of communal violence, and where nearly a dozen people were killed when a mosque was bombed in May. Officials said at least one of Saturday evening’s blasts was likely to have been a bomb.
”I will be able to confirm that around 34 have been reported dead,” RV Chandravadan, one of the city’s top officials, told the NDTV television channel.
A senior police officer said the two blasts occurred within 10 minutes of each other. ”The blasts took place almost simultaneously and we are still counting the number of dead,” Balwinder Singh, Hyderabad’s commissioner of police, told reporters.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh condemned the blasts and expressed concern for the welfare of those affected, and state government officials said the blasts appeared to be terrorist attacks.
In the past few years, a series of bomb blasts have hit India and killed hundreds of people, the most deadly of which was an attack on Mumbai’s railway system last July.
Indian police and security analysts have blamed Islamist militant groups in Pakistan for previous attacks and say they have been using hard-line Indian Muslims to plant bombs in an attempt to cover their cross-border links.
The attacks have been widely seen as attempts to derail a slow-moving peace process between India and Pakistan and trigger widespread communal violence — but they have failed to do either.
Targets
The most deadly of the blasts in Hyderabad was at a road-side food stand, where at least 24 people were killed, police said. The other target was the Lumbini amusement park where at least two blasts occurred at about 7.40pm local time during a popular laser show, TV channels said.
”I saw chairs flying in the air along with bodies,” said Vineet, a young man who had been watching the show with about about 200 other people.
Four unexploded bombs were also found, two in Lumbini and two others in cinemas in the city, which were defused once people had been evacuated, police said.
NDTV showed at least two dead bodies slumped under rows of blue plastic seating in the park, both with blood-soaked clothing.
Several college students were among those killed, a Reuters reporter on the scene said, and friends were crying near their bodies.
The India-Pakistan peace process was launched in 2004 after the nuclear-armed neighbours came to the brink of war.
Hyderabad is one of India’s biggest cities and a key information technology hub. It has a large Muslim minority and a history of communal clashes between Hindus and Muslims.
Officials said Hyderabad and other cities, including the capital, New Delhi, had been put on alert. — Reuters
Additional reporting by Kamil Zaheer, Onkar Pandey and Meenakshi Ray in New Delhi