Blasts rock Assam and Nagaland in rising violence
Blasts rock Assam and Nagaland in rising violence
Agencies, Guwahati, India
A fresh wave of bombs ripped through streets and marketplaces in
India's northeastern state of Assam on Sunday, killing four
people and wounding 40 in escalating violence blamed on tribal
separatists.
The police in India's insurgency-racked northeast reported
more killings overnight that brought the death toll to 53 with
141 injured.
Two bombs strapped to bicycles exploded in markets in
different parts of Assam, killing a man and wounding at least 20
people, mostly Sunday shoppers.
Two more went off in the streets of the remote towns of Sonari
and Baska, near the state's border with Bhutan, wounding another
20 people.
A string of bloody blasts and shootouts in adjoining Assam and
Nagaland states on Saturday killed at least 44 people. Overnight
another five victims died in hospital while four others were
killed in fresh violence, police said Sunday.
Late Saturday, one person was killed when gunmen fired on a
train near Bagmari village in eastern Assam's Karbi Anglong
district.
In New York, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan strongly
condemned the bombings and gunfire attacks, saying he had learnt
of the violence with "shock and dismay".
The attacks came as India Saturday commemorated the birth of
the country's independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, a champion of
non-violence.
Anger mounted in Assam over the government's failure to stop
the multiple attacks for a second day running.
"Where is the government? What is it doing? Fifty people have
died in two days," said Padmadhar Deka, a doctor in the state's
largest city, Guwahati.
Shops were shut and streets deserted in large parts of
northern and eastern Assam after the new attacks. Special
memorial services were held in churches across neighboring
Christian-majority Nagaland to mourn the victims.
Federal Home Minister Shivraj Patil, who began a tour of Assam
and Nagaland, said more troops would be deployed to bring peace
to the strategic region which shares borders with China, Myanmar,
Bangladesh and Bhutan.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but
officials blamed the outlawed National Democratic Front of
Bodoland, which is marking its "Raising Day" since it began
fighting for a separate homeland for Bodo tribals in 1985.
The tribals accuse the federal government of plundering the
region's natural resources and flooding it with outsiders.
"The NDFB, which was lying low for quite some time, is now
desperate," Assam Home Commissioner Biren Kumar Guhain said.
"They have carried out these attacks to boost the morale of
their cadres and to commemorate the Raising Day."
India's mountainous northeast is home to dozens of underground
groups, some fighting for greater autonomy, or statehood and
others for secession.
Security analysts say successive Indian governments have
largely ignored the northeast, focusing almost entirely on the
rebellion in the disputed northern region of Kashmir.
Three men, said by police to be Bodo guerrillas, died when
another bomb they were carrying went off in the rebel stronghold
of Sunitpur in Assam.
Troops with machine guns patrolled the streets in Nagaland, as
mourning families buried the victims of a wave of bombings and
gunfire that killed 53 people in the northeast region.
It was the worst attack in Nagaland since the main separatist
group National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isaac-Muivah)
signed a truce deal with the Indian government in 1997 and began
talks to end a long-running insurgency.
The NSCN (I-M) said underground groups opposed to peace in
Nagaland could have been behind the attacks and vowed to hunt
them down.
The group announced a reward of 100,000 rupees (US$2,170) for
information on the attacks.