At least 30 killed in Indian blasts
At least 13 blasts ripped through cities across India’s north-eastern state of Assam today, killing at least 30 people and wounding dozens more, police and witnesses said.
It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the blasts, but the region is torn by dozens of militant separatist groups that have long fought the government and one another.
At least 15 people died in four blasts in Gauhati, the state capital, and 15 more were killed when eight bombs and one hand grenade went off just before noon in other cities and towns in the western part of the state, said officials at the police control room.
A reporter at the scene of a blast in Gauhati said flames were leaping from charred cars, bodies were strewn across the road and a thick stream of black smoke was rising above the city.
Television footage showed firefighters spraying streams of water at charred, twisted cars and motorcycles that littered the blackened road.
Bystanders dragged the wounded and dead to cars that took them to hospitals, while police officers covered the burned remains of the dead with white sheets, leaving them in the street.
At least one explosion took place a few hundred metres from the secretariat, the building that houses the offices of the chief minister, the state’s top elected official.
NI Hussain, Gauhati’s deputy inspector general of police told the CNN-IBN news channel that police in the state were on high alert and searching for more unexploded bombs.
“Police have intensified the search for more bombs. There may be more blasts. You never know,” he said.
Worst hit outside of Gauhati was the Kokrajhar district, some 155 miles west of the capital, where at least 10 people were killed, police said.
Dozens of militant separatist groups are active in India’s north-east, an isolated region wedged between Bangladesh, Bhutan, China and Myanmar with only a thin corridor connecting it to the rest of India.
The separatists accuse the central government in New Delhi, 1,000 miles to the west, of exploiting the region’s natural resources while doing little for the indigenous people – most of whom are ethnically closer to Burma and China than to the rest of India.
More than 10,000 people have died in separatist violence over the past decade in the region.
India has also blamed several previous serial attacks in India on Islamic militants from nearby Bangladesh.
