JULY 13, 2011
Three Blasts Hit Mumbai
By GEETA ANAND And AMOL SHARMA
MUMBAI -- Bombs exploded in three places in India's financial capital of Mumbai on Wednesday evening, killing at least 21 people in what Indian officials suspect was a terrorist attack.
Home Minister P. Chidambaram said at a news conference that the city had been put on high alert and that officials believed the blasts were "a coordinated attack by terrorists."
In a statement, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh condemned the attacks. "I appeal to people of Mumbai to remain calm and show a united face," he said.
The blasts occurred within minutes of each other at around 6:45 p.m. in crowded parts of the city. Officials said the biggest of the three occurred in the Opera House neighborhood, an area of south Mumbai that hosts the city's diamond hub.
A second was at south Mumbai's Zaveri Bazaar, a wholesale market for jewelry, cloth, drugs and other goods that one local guild president said had one million visitors a day. Another was at a bustop in a middle-class central Mumbai neighborhood, Dadar.
The death toll continued to tick upward following the attack, with India's Home Affairs ministry saying just before midnight Wednesday local time that 21 people were killed and 141 injured.
The injured were being taken to local hospitals and a team of investigators from India's National Security Guard was on its way to the scenes, the home minister said. Around 50 people had been brought to Saifee Hospital, close to the Opera House site, according to one person coordinating entrances outside the hospital's heavily secured gate.
The bomb at Zaveri Bazaar was placed in an umbrella in or near a motorcycle in Khau Gali--or Food Street in the local Marathi language--Mumbai's police commissioner, Arup Patnaik, told local television channels.
Bharvani Shankar, a 28-year-old salesman in a jewelry store in Zaveri Bazaar, was eating dinner on the road when he heard a loud blast. "People were screaming and running. I saw flames," he said.
"I have never seen people running without hands and feet--it was horrible," said Pankaj Jain, who has a jewelry business across town and had come to the bazaar when the blast occurred. "It was chaos and horror."
Mumbai was the target of India's worst-ever terrorist attack in 2008, when Pakistan-based militants killed more than 160 people in a shooting spree.
The city and the nation were shocked by the 2008 attacks, which sparked a debate over India's internal security preparedness and led to a complete breakdown of diplomatic relations with India's neighbor and rival Pakistan.
Pakistan's foreign ministry said in a statement that President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani condemned the blasts and expressed sympathy over the loss of life.
U.S. President Barack Obama condemnted the attacks and said the U.S. continues to monitor the situation. "We will offer support to India's efforts to bring the perpetrators of these terrible crimes to justice," Mr. Obama said in a statement.
India and Pakistan have attempted in recent months to restart diplomatic dialogue. India is pressing Pakistan to follow through on its promises to bring the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack to justice.
The bomb at Dadar was hidden in an electrical box near a bus station, the police commissioner said.
Aditya Dubey, who has a flower business in the area, was at a temple at around 6:30 p.m. when he heard an explosion. "My body vibrated," he said, his hands still trembling. There were about 10 to 15 people in the small temple, he said, and people started running out in panic. He said he didn't initially realize where the explosion was, but when he came out he saw it was near the bus stop, about 100 meters away.
Zaveri Bazaar has been targeted twice before before. A bomb planted in a scooter there was diffused in 1993 amid a series of bombings that Indian authorities blamed on Pakistan-trained bombers. Pakistan denied any involvement.
A bomb there in 2003 killed about 50 people.
Following the 2008 terror attack on Mumbai, India blamed the banned Pakistan-based Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which led to the suspension of peace talks between the two nations.
Suba Chandran, director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, a New Delhi-based think tank said, that "the police and the government need to look into the implications of the blast--whether this is a prelude to bigger terrorist activities or simply a warning."
-- Megha Bahree in Mumbai; Shefali Anand, Tripti Lahiri, Krishna Pokharel and Vibhuti Agarwal in New Delhi and Tom Wright in Islamabad, Pakistan, contributed to this article.
Write to Geeta Anand at geeta.anand@wsj.com and Amol Sharma at amol.sharma@wsj.com