The Mumbai bombers should be identified within a week, investigating officials said on Sunday, after police carried out scores of raids in the western Indian city overnight.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh left for St. Petersburg on Sunday to attend the G8 summit with a clear agenda: the world community must declare “zero tolerance for terrorism anywhere”.
“The international community must isolate and condemn terrorists wherever they attack, whatever their cause and whichever country or group provides them sustenance and support,” Singh said in his departure statement in New Delhi.
On Friday Singh said Pakistani “elements” were supporting extremist groups within India and denounced Islamabad for not doing enough to eliminate them. A two-and-a-half-year-old peace process between the two countries is already showing the strain.
A top foreign ministry official told Reuters on Sunday talks between the chief diplomats of the two countries, which were due later this week, had been put off. “We told them the environment is not conducive,” the official said.
Lowered death toll
Authorities lowered the death toll from the synchronized bombings of Mumbai’s commuter train network, saying Sunday that 182 had been killed.
Officials previously said that at least 200 died and more than 700 were injured in Tuesday’s blasts.
The new toll was released by Sanjay Joshi of Maharashtra state’s disaster response coordination agency, who also said that 842 people were injured.
Of the injured, 286 remain hospitalized, he said. Mumbai is the capital of Maharashtra.
Officials said the death toll had been too high because some of the dead were counted twice by separate emergency agencies before being added to the overall tally.
Raids across Bombay
In Mumbai, hundreds of investigators raided nightclubs, beer-bars, hotels and guest houses, television news channels reported.
Notorious for its mafia gangs, most of them led by Muslim dons, the financial and film capital of India quickly sprang back to normality with people getting back on the jam-packed door-less commuter trains that carry millions of officegoers each day.
“We believe police will be able to zero in on the culprits within a week,” D.K. Shankaran, top bureaucrat in Maharashtra state of which Mumbai is the capital, told Reuters.
“Police have been doing combing operations and I believe we do have some information from those detained that should be able to give us some concrete leads.”
City police chief A.N. Roy said hundreds of people had been questioned but most had been let go. No arrests have been made.
Indian officials say local Muslims could have carried out the bombings, possibly members or former members of the Students’ Islamic Movement of India, banned in 2001 over allegations it had tried to stir religious unrest over the U.S.-led “war on terror.”
But they suspect the attacks may have been instigated by the Pakistan-based Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba or even by members of Pakistan’s powerful military spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence.
Pakistan angrily denounced the claims of ISI involvement as propaganda not supported by evidence.
Lashkar, long active in Indian Kashmir, has denied any role in the blasts, calling the attacks “inhuman and barbaric”.
India: 'Taking everything seriously'
Anti-terrorist officers in the sprawling metropolis, with its dozens of slums, said they were investigating an e-mail sent to an Indian TV channel, Aaj Tak, which it had received from a group called “Laskhar-e-Qahhar (Army of Fury),” claiming the attacks.
“We are investigating this e-mail and taking everything seriously at this stage,” K.P. Raghuvanshi, chief of the city’s anti-terrorism squad, told Reuters.
In the e-mail, the group said the attacks were a reprisal for Indian rule in Kashmir and the 2002 Gujarat riots where some 2,500 people were killed, most of them Muslims, according to human rights groups.
It said it planned to target major landmarks in Delhi and Mumbai and the Taj Mahal monument in the northern city of Agra.
An Indian analyst said the group was a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba and had also claimed responsibility for bomb attacks in March at a Hindu temple and a railway station in the pilgrimage town of Varanasi which killed 15 people.
“The Lashkar-e-Taiba is under increasing international scrutiny, which is why it created Qahhar as its front,” Ajai Sahni of New Delhi’s Institute for Conflict Management said. “They are basically trying to shift the blame.”
