Author: Reuters
Publication: Yahoo News
Date: May 14, 2003
URL: http://in.news.yahoo.com/030514/137/24a9r.html
Police said on Wednesday they found
more than 250 crude bombs and a big store of arms belonging to an offshoot
of an outlawed Pakistan-based militant group who planned to use them to
attack targets in Bombay.
The discovery followed a wave of
blasts that rocked Bombay between December and March, killing 14 people.
Police said 253 bombs found in a
dried-up well in Padgha village, 80 km north of Bombay, were similar to
the explosives used in the blasts.
They said three people had been
arrested.
Bombay police commissioner R.S.
Sharma said the arms belonged to a splinter faction of the guerrilla group
Lashkar-e-Taiba which is fighting Indian rule in disputed Kashmir.
"The group planned more such attacks
in and around Bombay," he told reporters. "They wanted to create communal
tension by planting bombs at (city landmarks like) the Gateway of India
and state government headquarters."
The wave of bomb attacks in recent
months have unnerved Bombay residents who dread a repeat of a series of
explosions in the city in 1993 that killed 250 people and were blamed on
groups avenging Muslim deaths in Hindu-Muslim riots.
The most recent blast in which a
bomb ripped through a rush-hour train on March 13, killing 10 people and
wounding 75, came a day after the 10th anniversary of the 1993 explosions.
The blasts a decade ago were blamed
on groups avenging Muslim deaths in religious riots after Hindu zealots
destroyed the 16th-century Babri mosque in Ayodhya.
