66 killed in India train explosion
At least 66 people were killed in India today when an explosion on a train heading for Pakistan set off a fire that swept through two coaches.
An official said the attack was aimed at undermining the peace process between India and Pakistan. Dozens more people were injured.
Authorities say two suitcases packed with unexploded crude bombs and bottles of petrol were found in train carriages not hit in the attack, leading them to believe the fire was set off by an identical explosive device.
“This is an act of sabotage,” said railway minister Laloo Prasad in Patna, India. “This is an attempt to derail the improving relationship between India and Pakistan.”
India’s junior home minister, Sriprakash Jaiswal, said the home-made bombs were not powerful and were simply intended to start a fire on the train one day before Pakistani foreign minister Khursheed Kasuri was to arrive in New Delhi for talks on the ongoing peace process.
Jaiswal called the attack part of a “conspiracy … to disturb communal harmony, India’s stability and to disturb the peace process between India and Pakistan".
Prime minister Manmohan Singh expressed anguish at the loss of lives and said “the culprits will be caught,” a brief statement from his office said.
The fire engulfed two coaches of the Samjhauta Express, one of two train links between rival India and Pakistan. Because of security concerns, the train is kept sealed – with locked doors and barred windows in the lower-class coaches - from New Delhi to the border, and passengers may have been trapped inside the burning carriages.
The fire broke out just before the train reached the station in the village of Dewana, about 50 miles north of New Delhi.
People who live near the tracks rushed to the train with buckets of water soon after the fire broke out, and the blaze was eventually extinguished after fire engines arrived.
Speaking at the scene, Bharti Arora, superintendent of the Haryana state railway police, said the death toll had risen to 66.
At least 30 passengers who were burned or injured in the blaze had been admitted to hospital in the nearby town of Panipat, the general manager of the Northern Railway, VN Mathur, told reporters.
The dead included Indians and Pakistanis, officials said.
The train was travelling from New Delhi to Atari, the last railway station before the border with Pakistan. At Atari, passengers change trains in a special station, switching to a Pakistani train that takes them to the Pakistani city of Lahore.
The train links are one of the most visible results of the peace process underway between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, and one of the easiest ways to travel across the heavily militarised border.
In 2002, Hindu-Muslim riots broke out after a train fire killed 60 Hindus returning from a religious pilgrimage.
Muslims were blamed for the fire in the western state of Gujarat, and more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslim, were killed by Hindu mobs.
