Terror Attack In Jaipur India Leave 80 Dead Scores Injured – Four Being Questioned

A shock of thick black hair was all that peeped out from under a white sheet that covered a small body Wednesday at a morgue in Jaipur after serial bomb blasts killed at least 80 people.

Seven bombs went off along a main shopping stretch of the Indian city’s old centre, also leaving 200 wounded late Tuesday.

The body on the stretcher belonged to 10-year-old Kanha Mahar, who had gone to a temple to the Hindu deity Hanuman on a traditional day to pray to the monkey god.

A sudden explosion left him with a huge gash in his head.

“We were looking for him all evening,” said his uncle Jagdish Kumar Gathera, who found him at the hospital, unable to breathe.

The doctors ordered drugs but before they arrived the boy was dead.

Gathera and other family members looked on in shocked silence as Mahar’s body was taken off a rusty white gurney and into an ambulance, leaving behind a pool of blood.

Volunteers of the right-wing Hindu organisation Rashtriya Swayamseval Sangh (RSS, National Volunteers Association), who were manning the short-staffed hospital mortuary said it was a scene that had played through the night.

Bodies had arrived from one of half a dozen blast sites, family members had to search for loved ones and corpses were put into the morgue’s deep-freeze to preserve them for identification through the coming hot day.

With several of the bombs going off near Hindu temples, there were fears that Hindu-Muslim riots could break out, an ever-present worry in religiously divided India.

The nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which has links to the RSS and rules the western desert state of Rajasthan, of which Jaipur is the capital, called a strike Wednesday to protest at the bombings.

But in the hospital wards and at the morgue, both Hindus and Muslims, a strong minority in the city, were among the dead.

Source

Pattern To Bombings

“And Now, It’s Jaipur” says The Times Of India.

The newspaper says the explosions were the “21st terror attack” outside Indian-administered Kashmir in the past three years.

It says Tuesday evening’s blast bore “close resemblance” to similar explosions in a temple in the holy city of Varanasi, the train bombings in the western city of Mumbai and the suburbs of Malegaon in western India over the past two years.

The paper quotes unnamed sources saying the blasts “pointed to a sophisticated operation that only foreign-trained groups are capable of executing”.

The newspaper also says that the blasts, which happened in “affluent and predominantly Hindu areas” were aimed at “fuelling” tension between communities.

Source – BBC

4 Being Held -Questioned

Police in the Indian tourist city of Jaipur have questioned four people over a string of bombings that killed 80 people and left about 200 injured.

“We have picked them up for questioning in regards to the attacks last night but we have not booked them on any charge,” a police spokesman said.

Among those being questioned was one of those injured in the blasts yesterday and a city rickshaw puller.

Source