Serial bomb blasts kill 13 outside Indian courts

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A series of near-simultaneous blasts on Friday outside courts in three Indian cities left at least 13 people dead and more than 40 wounded in what police called a terror attack on lawyers.

Nine people were killed, including three lawyers, in the holiest Hindu city of Varanasi and four more people died in Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh state home secretary JN Chamber told AFP.

“This a terrorist attack on the advocates of our state,” additional director-general of police Brij Lal said by telephone from the state capital Lucknow.

Uttar Pradesh police chief Vikram Singh said the bombs were transported to the courthouses of Varanasi — where a string of powerful explosions killed 23 people in March 2006 — Faizabad and Lucknow by bicycles, which were then abandoned.

“We have issued an alert all over the state after the blasts, which might have been planned to create an atmosphere of terror,” Singh said. He added that reinforcements were being deployed to prevent a possible public backlash.

Secretary Chamber said three blasts were reported from Varanasi and two each in Lucknow and Faizabad.

Twenty-two people were hurt in Varanasi, 14 more in a “shed” used by lawyers at Faizabad courthouse and another five in Lucknow, Chamber said.

The attacks came a week after the Uttar Pradesh bar council unanimously decided not to defend Islamist militants facing charges in the state.

NDTV television station showed footage of at least two lifeless bodies being dragged away in Varanasi.

Several bleeding people were also shown amid wreckage strewn over the ground.

Faizabad is seven kilometres (four miles) from Ayodhya, a hotbed of Hindu-Muslim rivalry where Hindus tore down a 16th-century mosque in 1992 sparking nationwide riots that left 2,000 died.

Ayodhya police chief G.N. Khanna meanwhile told reporters that the city’s chief Hindu priest Mahant Nitya Gopal Das on Thursday received a letter purportedly written by the Al-Qaeda terror network telling him convert to Islam or die.

India’s junior home minister said Friday’s blasts looked to be acts of terror.

“The fact that three blasts took place at the same time …it is clear that it is a conspiracy,” Sriprakash Jaiswal told reporters in New Delhi.

“The motive could be to spread terror.”

India has been plagued by bombings across the country in recent years and routinely points the finger at foreign-based Islamic militant groups fighting its rule in the Himalayan state of Kashmir.

In October, an explosion killed six people and wounded 32 in a packed cinema hall in Ludhiana in Punjab state in northern India. Police called it a “terrorist” bombing.

That blast came days after two people were killed and nearly a dozen wounded in a blast at one of India’s most revered Islamic shrines in Ajmer in the northern state of Rajasthan.

In August, 43 people were killed and 70 injured in the southern city of Hyderabad when attackers triggered blasts at an outdoor auditorium and a popular eatery.

Analysts say Islamic extremist groups are attempting to stoke sectarian tensions to derail an India-Pakistan peace process and damage the country’s booming economy.

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