Police arrest 3 in blasts that leave 77 dead

November 2, 2008 at 12:00a.m.

The suspected terror groups seek an independent homeland in northeast India.

GAUHATI, India (AP) — Police have arrested three people and are investigating whether local militants received help from other terrorist groups in carrying out coordinated attacks that killed at least 77 people in India’s troubled northeast, officials said Saturday.

Two people were taken into custody because their vehicles — a car and a motorcycle — are believed to have been used in two of the 13 blasts that rocked Assam state Thursday, said Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta, a state inspector-general of police.

Police also arrested Nazir Ahmed, whose cell phone was allegedly used by a little-known group to send a text message to television station News Live claiming responsibility for the attacks, Mahanta told The Associated Press.

R. Chandranathan, another state inspector-general of police, said the group, calling itself the Islamic Security Force (Indian Mujahadeen), also thanked its partners in the text message and warned of future attacks.

Chandranathan, who is heading the police investigation, said the group came into existence in 2000 mainly to thwart attacks by Bodo tribespeople on Muslim settlers in Assam state, but that nothing had been heard of it since then.

Police were unaware of the group’s activities and were trying to identify the partners mentioned in the message, he said.

The name echoes that of the Indian Mujahideen, a group unknown until May when it said it was behind bombings in the western city of Jaipur that killed 61 people. It also claimed responsibility for blasts in the western state of Gujarat in July that killed at least 45, and blasts in New Delhi in September that killed 21.

On a visit to the violence-wracked state Saturday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh refused to speculate on who was behind the blasts.

“It would not be proper on my part to come to any conclusion,” the Press Trust of India news agency quoted Singh as saying after he visited some wounded at a hospital in Gauhati. “A proper investigation has begun to find the culprits.” Gauhati is the Assam state capital.

On Friday, Mahanta said the state’s largest separatist group, the United Liberation Front of Asom, or ULFA, was the main target of the investigation, but that the sophistication of the blasts suggested the rebel group was “assisted by a force who has adequate expertise in such attacks.” He did not elaborate.

In an e-mail sent to reporters, Anjan Borehaur, a ULFA spokesman, denied his group had any role in the blasts.

ULFA is one of the largest and most feared of several dozen militant groups active in the region, having launched dozens of attacks since it took up arms in 1979.

Most of the groups want independent homelands in India’s northeast, an isolated region wedged between Bangladesh, Bhutan, China and Myanmar with only a thin corridor connecting it to the rest of India. Its residents are ethnically closer to Burma and China than India.

ULFA says Assam and the rest of the northeast were never traditionally part of India and that the federal government has been exploiting the area’s natural resources while doing little for the indigenous people.