INDIA:POLICE ARRESTED two men yesterday in connection with the serial bombings that ripped through the crowded bazaars of India's western tourist city of Jaipur killing 80 people and injuring over 200.
"We have arrested two people and have detained several more for questioning," Vasundhara Raje, chief minister of Rajasthan state, of which Jaipur is the capital, said but declined to elaborate.
"This seems to have been done by some international group," Mrs Raje, who belongs to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, told a news conference, making a veiled reference to neighbouring nuclear rival Pakistan.
Pakistan-based Islamic militants, fighting Indian rule in northern, disputed Jammu and Kashmir province were blamed routinely for such attacks by New Delhi. Mrs Raje also said the bombs used in Tuesday nights attack, in which seven women and 10 children also died, were a mix of plastic RDX explosive, ammonium nitrate and ball-bearings that acted like tiny missiles once the devices were detonated.
Officials and eyewitnesses said these ball bearings, still embedded in walls and doors in areas where the blasts took place, were largely responsible for the fatalities.
Officials said the bombs, all tied to newly purchased bicycles and scattered in a 500-yard arc around the busy market place that is the hub of Jaipur's emerald and gold market and the city's principal commercial centre, were detonated to explode within a span of 20 minutes beginning 7.20pm.
"They were ensured to inflict the maximum damage at a time when the market was packed," banker RS Malik said. It was meticulously planned and diabolically executed, he added.
"Jaipur's fate is now sealed as it has become the terrorists target," said Sanjay Bhatia from his hospital bed where he was carried after being given up for dead. Its future is bleak, he lamented.
Nearby lay four-year-old Sameena Khan who had lost her mother and two aunts in the blasts as they had accompanied her shopping. "There is no one left for me in this world," she whispered.
Police, meanwhile, imposed a curfew in Jaipur to prevent any retaliatory violence between the city's majority Hindu community and Muslims who comprise around a fifth of the population.
But India believes that many Islamic militant groups attempting to infiltrate its territory in northern Jammu and Kashmir state in recent days were backed by Pakistan.