MUMBAI, 15 November 2006 — A huge anti-terror drill at two busy railway stations in India’s financial hub was called off yesterday after security agencies failed to cope with hundreds of thousands of rush-hour commuters, officials said.

The drill was to test the security preparedness of India’s biggest city whose teeming rail network was hit by serial bomb blasts in July in which over 200 people were killed, an attack blamed on Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant group fighting Indian rule in Kashmir.

The security exercise involved searching every passenger passing through the two stations — which handle more than 2.5 million commuters every day — and checking their baggage through X-ray machines.

“We have decided not to go ahead with the security drill because there are just too many people to check,” said railway spokesman A.K. Singh, adding that there was no plan to try it again anytime soon.

The exercise went off well on Sunday, but chaotic scenes broke out on Monday evening as tens of thousands of rush-hour commuters had to stand in long lines to go through just a few metal-detectors.

An hour into the checking, people’s frustration boiled over, forcing railway officials to remove the detectors and carry out a token frisking operation. “It’s a failure. Too many people to handle,” said Satyaprakash, another railway official. Security experts say India’s vast railway network, which carries about 14 million passengers every day, is a soft target for attackers, who placed bombs on luggage racks of Mumbai’s unchecked commuter trains and platforms in July.

One Found Guilty, One Acquitted in Blasts Case

The designated Terrorists and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA) court Judge P.K. Kode, delivering the verdict in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case yesterday, declared Ehsan Mohammed Tufail Qureshi guilty of keeping in his possession a Mouser pistol, which was part of the smuggled arms and explosives consignment by prime conspirator Yakub alias Tiger Memon, meant to trigger serial blasts at several places in Mumbai.

The other accused Fazal Rehman Khan, was however acquitted by the judge for lack of evidence, as the prosecution could not establish that Fazal was persuaded by another co-accused Firoz Amani Malik to undergo an arms training in Pakistan for committing terrorist acts in Mumbai.