Train bombings: Police 'expecting breakthrough'
Investigators said today they expected a breakthrough soon over the Mumbai train bombings, which officials have linked to Pakistan.
“It’s premature to speak of information we have received, but we are working on all possible leads,” said the city’s police chief AN Roy. “We believe the breakthrough will come soon.”
Yesterday prime minister Manmohan Singh said: “There has to be a firm commitment that Pakistani territory is not used to support terrorist acts directed against our country … but the commitment has to be backed by action on the ground.”
Singh spoke to reporters travelling with him to St Petersburg, Russia, for the summit of the Group of Eight leaders of industrialised nations, where he is attending as an observer.
The eight blasts on Mumbai’s commuter train network killed 182 people and injured more than 800 last Tuesday, triggering public anger amid accusations that the perpetrators were Islamic militants aided by Muslim-majority neighbouring Pakistan. India is predominantly Hindu.
Authorities lowered the death toll from the bombings from more than 200, saying that separate emergency agencies counted some victims twice. Sanjay Joshi, of Maharashtra state’s disaster response co-ordination agency, said that 842 people were injured and 286 of them remained in hospital.
No one has been arrested over the co-ordinated attacks, though investigators suspect Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, a Pakistan-based Muslim militant group blamed for a number of bomb blasts in India in recent years.
India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed, have fought three wars since their independence from Britain in 1947.
Two of the wars were over the Muslim-majority Himalayan territory of Kashmir, which is divided between the two countries but claimed in entirety by both.
A number of militant groups have long been fighting for independence for the portion of Kashmir controlled by predominantly Hindu India, or for its merger with mostly Islamic Pakistan.
Meanwhile, India’s leading movie and cricket stars will join Singh in a two-minute film to be broadcast on national television tomorrow that urges Indians to stay united and not to be cowed by terrorists.
“It’s a campaign for ’One India, One People’. The celebrities speak of the strength in unity and how this is a fitting answer to terrorists as well a tribute to people who died in the blasts,” said Sabbas Joseph, head of Wizcraft Entertainment, the company that made the video.
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