NEW DELHI: At least one person was killed and six injured yesterday in an explosion in India’s western Gujarat state, the Press Trust of India reported. The Indian news channel Times Now reported two people killed and 13 wounded, and said the blast originated from a motorcycle and hit a marketplace.
“There has been an explosion in Modasa town but we are yet to confirm how it took place. Bomb and dog squads have been rushed to the site,” District Superintendent of Police R.B. Bhrambhatt told PTI.
The low-intensity blast, which took place in the state’s Sabarkantha district, resembled a bomb explosion in a New Delhi marketplace on Saturday which killed two people and wounded 22 others, officials were quoted as saying.
Several Indian cities — Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and New Delhi — have been hit by serial bombings since May, all of them claimed by an Islamist militant group called the Indian Mujahedeen.
The Indian government recently unveiled new security measures to tackle what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said were “vast gaps” in intelligence gathering. The latest blast came hours after police in Gujarat’s commercial capital Ahmedabad found 17 “crude explosive devices” dumped in rubbish.
Meanwhile, police in the Uttar Pradesh state say they have arrested a key suspect in a series of blasts that rocked several Indian cities and killed more than 80 people since November last year.
State police spokesman Suren Shrivastava says Mohammed Arif belongs to the Indian Mujahedeen group which has claimed responsibility for the bomb attacks in New Delhi more than two weeks ago, in the western state of Gujarat in July and in the Indian city of Lucknow in November last year. Shrivastava says Arif — who’s in his mid-20s — was arrested in Lucknow yesterday by state police.
Indian police have also detained about more than 10 people in connection with a blast in New Delhi, officials said on Sunday. Police said they had witnesses who could identify the two men who dropped a plastic bag in the capital’s busy Mehrauli market on Saturday, before speeding away on a motorcycle.
