INDIA was on high alert today after a bomb exploded in Varanasi, one of its holiest cities and top tourist destinations, killing a one-year-old girl and wounding dozens of people.
Fearing more attacks, the home ministry put police across the country on high alert as investigators picked over the site of the explosion at a crowded bathing area on the River Ganges in Uttar Pradesh.
Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh said the blast was the work of “terrorists”, while a home-grown Islamist group, Indian Mujahedeen, claimed responsibility in an email sent to various media outlets.
The explosion at around 6:30pm (1300 GMT) yesterday targeted one of the city’s many ritual bathing ghats on the Ganges, causing a stampede in which a number of the victims were injured.
A one-year-old girl was killed and as many as 37 suffered injuries, including six foreign tourists from France, Germany, Italy, Japan and South Korea, hospital sources said. .
Prime Minister Dr Singh led condemnation of the attack.
“It was an attempt to weaken our resolve to fight the evil forces of terrorism, and the terrorists will not succeed,” he told reporters in New Delhi yesterday.
The last blast in India was in February when a bomb targeted a restaurant in Pune, killing 17.
“There were people running everywhere and falling over each other. It was chaos,” one witness, Ramlal Jaichand, told the the Hindi news channel IBN 7.
Police told reporters the blast was of low-intensity and originated from a crude device that did not appear to have contained metal shrapnel that would have made the death and injury toll much higher.
Large numbers of Hindu devotees gather in Varanasi throughout the year to cremate their dead on the banks of the Ganges, and bathe in the waters.
In 2006, some 20 people were killed and 60 wounded in two bomb explosions at a temple and a train station in Varanasi that were blamed on Muslim militants.
Yesterday’s blast came a day after the anniversary of the 1992 razing of a mosque by Hindu zealots in Ayodhya.
The email from the Indian Mujahedeen said the attack was retaliation for a recent court ruling that divided the disputed Ayodhya site between Hindu and Muslim claimants.
