 Even as the dead are still being counted in India's worst terrorist attack in more than a decade, suspicion has already fallen on Islamic terrorists — though not al-Qaeda.
| Actually, they're on my Suspicious list, behind Lashkar and Jaish and before the local commies. |
India is home to a Muslim insurgency in Kashmir, and earlier in the day militants killed eight people and injured 30 in five separate bomb attacks in the capital, Srinagar. And while no one said those same insurgents carried out Tuesday's rush-hour train attacks in Bombay — which police said killed at least 130 people and injured 260 — security sources told TIME they suspected a shadowy alliance of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) working with indigenous Indian Muslims from the banned Student Islamic Movemement of India (SIMI).
SIMI detonated a total of nine bombs in Bombay during the course of 2003, killing close to 80 people and injuring hundreds more. The same loose grouping of Islamic radicals are also suspected of being behind a series of attacks in India in the last year that included three blasts in New Delhi last October that killed 60 and three more in the holy Hindu city of Varanasi in March this year, which killed 20, as well as smaller attacks in Bangalore and Hyderabad.
Ajay Sahni of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi said it was unlikely that there had been any trigger for the attacks. Rather this was an "ongoing war" against Hindu-majority India by South Asian Muslims. "It is a continuous process of preparing for attacks and carrying them out," he said. "When these people are able to bring something to fruition, they do it. The act itself is the objective. It says: 'We're here. And this is what we are going to do to you.'" In a paper published Monday, Institute research fellow Bibhu Prasad Routray warned that SIMI had been stepping up its operations in Bombay and the surrounding state of Maharashtra. He described several "SIMI strongholds" in the state, adding that the "seizure of 30 kilograms of RDX, 17 AK-47s and 50 hand grenades from Aurangabad and Malegaon [two Maharashtran towns] between May 9 and 12 and subsequent arrests of 11 LeT terrorists pointed to linkages between SIMI and the LeT." |
