Facing a Wave of Violence, India Is Rattled

Ajit Solanki/Associated Press

Bloody water ran early Sunday outside a hospital in Ahmedabad, India, where a blast on Saturday killed husband-and-wife doctors and two sanitation workers.

Over the past several years, terrorist attacks in India have become an everyday presence in everyday places. The targets seem to have nothing in common except that they are ordinary and brazenly easy to strike.

In eastern Varanasi, a deadly explosion interrupted Hindu devotees as they lighted oil lamps to Hanuman, the monkey god, one Tuesday at dusk. In southern Hyderabad, a homemade bomb planted inside a historic mosque killed worshipers on a Friday afternoon. In Mumbai, India’s largest city, nearly 200 commuters on packed city trains died in a series of blasts.

And, in the most recent attack, 17 back-to-back explosions struck shoppers and strollers on Saturday evening in Ahmedabad in western India, and then two blasts hit the very hospitals where the wounded and their relatives rushed for help, killing 49 people and wounding more than 200.

In a country long familiar with sharply focused violence — whether sectarian or fueled by insurgencies in Kashmir in the 1990s — the impersonal nature of the latest violence is new and deeply unsettling.

“This is different, because for the first time it’s everyday, it’s utterly anonymous, it’s excessive,” said Shiv Vishvanathan, a professor of anthropology in Ahmedabad. “The familiar becomes unfamiliar,” he said. “The apple seller you meet might be carrying a bomb. It creates suspicion. It’s a perfect way to destabilize society.”

Officials have said the attacks are attempts to provoke violence between Hindus and Muslims that have not succeeded so far. Virtually none of the attacks have resulted in convictions; a suspect in the Varanasi bombings was shot and killed by the police.

Reminders of the danger are everywhere. There are metal detectors at the gates of multiplex movie theaters and commuter trains, and even at the threshold of prominent temples and mosques. Yet they have had no bearing on the far greater number of easier, more densely crowded targets.

India’s congested cities offer rich opportunities. A small bundle of explosives, hidden as they have been in lunch boxes, pressure cookers and on the backs of bicycles, can cause grievous damage. It is also why the attackers have so successfully eluded punishment.

A report last year by the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington concluded that from January 2004 to March 2007, the death toll from terrorist attacks in India was 3,674, second only to that in Iraq during the same period.

Ahmedabad, home to 3.5 million people and Gujarat’s commercial center, is no stranger to violence. In 2002, a train fire that killed several dozen Hindus led to the killing of 1,000 Muslims over several days, one of the worst outbreaks of religious violence in India’s history.

An obscure group calling itself the Indian Mujahedeen warned Saturday that an attack was about to take place “in revenge of Gujarat,” plainly referring to the 2002 killings. The statement was sent in an e-mail message, written in English, to television stations just before the first blasts.

H. P. Singh, the city’s joint police commissioner, said Sunday that some of the explosives had been strapped to bicycles in crowded streets and markets. Later in the evening, a pair of car bombs went off in front of two city hospitals. At one of them, Civil Hospital, the dead included husband-and-wife doctors and two sanitation workers.

The police said two additional bombs had been found and defused, in Ahmedabad and nearby Gandhinagar, Gujarat’s capital. On Sunday afternoon, the police found two abandoned cars in Surat, an industrial city in Gujarat, one stuffed with bomb-making chemicals and detonators, the other with live bombs. The police said they were still tracing the cars’ ownership.

On Friday, there was a series of similar low-intensity blasts in southern Bangalore, one of which killed a woman standing at a bus stop. Two months ago in Jaipur, synchronized blasts on bicycles killed 56 people; the Indian Mujahedeen sent an e-mail message claiming credit for those attacks.

On Sunday, a police official, P. P. Pandey, said “a single mind” was suspected to be behind the three latest attacks. The police said they had detained people for questioning; The Associated Press reported 30 were in custody. Officials offered no further details about who was involved in the group or a possible motivation behind the bombings.

The morning after the Ahmedabad blasts, residents of this sprawling Indian capital pointed out that while it was virtually impossible to take precautions against terrorist attacks, they had grown increasingly vigilant of the strangers around them.

Hari Om Suri, 52, stood outside a popular seafood restaurant at the Defense Colony Market, scanning the parking lot for anything that looked suspicious.

Mohan and Helen Nanjundan ordered a chicken sizzler for lunch at Moet’s, a popular restaurant, and warily eyed the bicycles parked outside. Bicycles, a poor man’s transport here, are common. “Every few months, there is another one in another city,” said Mr. Nanjundan, 52. “Sometimes we tell ourselves to stay away from dangerous places, but it’s hard to say where that is.”

“I’ve never looked at a bicycle before,” said Ms. Nanjundan, 56.

Puneet Gupta, 23, said he was trying to avoid crowded markets, but his girlfriend, Jyotsna Malhotra, 21, said she was determined not to let it get in the way of her fun. “We are not sure what is going to happen tomorrow,” she said. “Better to live today, shop, get him to spend some money on me.”

Last August, after a pair of synchronized bombs tore through an amusement park and a fast-food restaurant in Hyderabad, killing at least 40 people, an Indian newspaper called the violence “a war on the way we live.”

by NYTimes

2 Die in Bus Blasts in Southwest China

Associated Press

One of two buses damaged in separate explosions in Kunming, in southwest China, on Monday.

Two public buses exploded during the Monday morning rush hour in the city of Kunming, killing at least two people and injuring 14 others in what the authorities described as deliberate attacks as China is tightening security nationwide and warning of possible terrorist threats in advance of next month’s Olympic Games.

The blasts struck at 7:05 and 8:10 a.m., state media reported. Public security officials in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province in southwestern China, provided no information about whether the explosions were coordinated, nor did the authorities say whether they were the work of terrorist groups or disgruntled individuals.

By Monday afternoon, the police were still searching for suspects. Checkpoints were set up on highways, while the police were tightening security at Kunming’s airport and train terminal, according to the Web site of the provincial public security bureau. A photograph of one bus posted online showed shards from a shattered window spread across a street but also suggested that the blast had not been powerful enough to inflict catastrophic damage.

China has experienced a spate of riots and public protests as the country prepares for the Aug. 8 opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.

In recent years, public protests have become common in China, especially in rural areas where farmers have demonstrated against illegal land seizures and official corruption. But the authorities are trying to tamp down embarrassing outbursts ahead of the Olympics and have ordered local authorities to address local grievances and block petitioners from coming to Beijing.

As many as 30,000 people rioted in Weng’an County, in Guizhou Province, in late June, in response to allegations that the local police had mishandled the investigation of the death of a teenage girl. Last week, a mob of 100 angry protesters attacked a village police station in Guangdong Province in an uprising over allegations of police malfeasance.

Last weekend, the police in a rural region of Yunnan Province killed two people after a violent clash with 500 rubber farmers. The farmers, armed with knives, injured 41 police officers and damaged several police cars in a confrontation rooted in a long-running dispute between farmers and a local rubber company, state media reported. Provincial officials are investigating the attack.

Beyond the escalating internal disturbances, the authorities are warning that foreign terrorist groups may be plotting to disrupt the Olympics. Chinese officials have singled out the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement and say they destroyed 41 training bases and arrested 82 people.

“Intelligence reports show the group has been planning to carry out terrorist attacks during the Games,” Ma Zhenchuan, director of Olympic security, told China Central Television.

Some human rights advocates say China is exaggerating the threat posed by the group to justify a broad security crackdown in Xinjiang, the restive western region that is home to the country’s Muslim Uighur population.

In Kunming, the first bus blast killed Wang Dezhi, a 30-year-old woman, while injuring 10 other people, according to the provincial public security Web site. The second explosion was 65 minutes later on a bus following the same route. In this blast, a 26-year-old man, Chen Shifei, died and four people were injured.

Witnesses on one bus told Chinese newspapers that a short man in a black shirt and gray pants boarded the bus before the explosion and sat behind the driver. After the bus stopped and then prepared to get going again, the man jumped up and yelled for the driver to let him off, the witnesses said.

Witnesses told a joint reporting team from the Yunnan Information Daily and the Southern Newspaper Group that the man had left a black leather bag on the bus. About 30 seconds later, the bus exploded. Witnesses on the second bus told Chinese journalists they had also seen a black bag.

Ms. Wang was returning with her husband to celebrate the birthday of their 5-year-old daughter. Her husband suffered minor injuries in the explosion.

With more than three million residents, Kunming is a temperate city that serves as a gateway to some of China’s most scenic areas in outlying Yunnan Province. It serves as a transportation hub to Southeast Asia and is known for its high percentage of minority communities in the province’s mountainous regions.

by NYTimes

Pakistani Bear Market Has Investors Raging in the Streets

Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press

Tires burned Thursday in front of the stock exchange in Islamabad, Pakistan, as protesters vented anger over a two-week plunge in share prices. While Wall Street prices rose, Pakistani shares fell over concern about handling of the ailing economy.

Angry investors stormed out of the Karachi Stock Exchange on Thursday, hurling stones and planters at the building in protest over slumping share prices.

The benchmark index fell for the 15th consecutive trading day, the worst losing run in at least 18 years. Angry investors also protested in Lahore and Islamabad, Pakistani newspapers reported.

“I have lost my life savings in the last 15 days, and no one in the government or regulators came to help us,” said Imran Inayat, 45, a protester and a former broker in Karachi, Bloomberg News reported. He said his loss was $4,175.

Much of the protesters’ anger was directed at the new government, which is perceived as unable to fix an ailing economy plagued by runaway inflation and large budget and trade deficits.

The benchmark index on the Karachi Stock Exchange, the nation’s biggest, declined by nearly 3 percent on Thursday. Investors demanded a temporary halt to trading. When the exchange management refused to stop trading, investors went on a rampage. The index has dropped by 36 percent since reaching a record high in April.

Some of the fury was also directed at the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan, which this week removed a 1 percent daily limit on price declines. The restriction was aimed at halting a slide that has wiped out $30 billion in companies’ combined market value over three months.

“There has been some level of mismanagement by the authorities,” said Habib-ur-Rehman, a manager at Atlas Asset Management Ltd. in Karachi, according to Bloomberg. “This may be due to their misperception that they can prevent the market from falling. Investors have to learn to bear losses as they do gains.”

Volume at the stock exchange fell to the lowest in a decade. In response, regulators eased curbs on trading, including a ban on short-selling. Foreign investors have fled the exchange, according to data compiled by the central bank.

Much of the investor unease stems from the inability of the new civilian government, in power since late March, to stem the economic crisis.

Shortages of wheat, electricity and gasoline have affected all sectors of society. Blackouts have been a fixture of daily life for six months. Long lines are common at stores selling wheat, the staple food, at subsidized prices.

The government has been riven by rivalries between the leader of the major political party, Asif Ali Zardari, and the head of the coalition’s junior partner, Nawaz Sharif, over how to restore 60 judges dismissed last year by President Pervez Musharraf.

A survey of Pakistanis released Thursday by the International Republican Institute in Washington showed widespread discontent with the economy. The survey, in which 3,484 Pakistanis were interviewed between June 1 and 15, showed that 92 percent of respondents saw shortages of wheat, natural gas and electricity as a “serious problem.”

In addition, 71 percent of respondents said that inflation was a major issue, compared with only 55 percent in a similar survey in January. The survey’s margin of sampling error was plus or minus 1.7 percentage points.

by NYTimes

9 Terrorism Suspects Detained in Indonesia After a Raid Uncovers Bombs

Achmad Ibrahim/Associated Press

An Indonesian police officer with one of the nine terrorism suspects arrested on Thursday in Sumatra. An antiterrorism official said the men were planning an attack on Westerners in Jakarta.

Indonesian police transferred nine terrorism suspects, bound and wearing black hoods, to the capital, Jakarta, on Thursday after their arrest in southern Sumatra.

According to the police, a raid on Wednesday in the Sumatran port city of Palembang by an elite Indonesian counterterrorism team turned up more than a dozen homemade bombs and a cache of ammunition. A police spokesman refused to give further details, saying that the prisoners were being interrogated about the nature of their plan and their roles within the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist network.

Indonesian news outlets quoted an antiterrorism official as saying that the men were planning an attack on Westerners in Jakarta, but no details were given.

Jemaah Islamiyah is believed to have a vast network throughout the island of Sumatra.

The police confirmed that at least one of the suspects was Singaporean, but experts dismissed rumors that he might be Mas Selamat Kastari, who is suspected of being the leader of Jemaah Islamiyah. He escaped from a Singapore prison in March.

Sidney Jones, a terrorism expert who is the director of International Crisis Group in Jakarta, however, said the escapee was not among those caught in the Wednesday raids. “They are all certainly members of Jemaah Islamiyah,” Ms. Jones said. “And at least one is Singaporean, but he is definitely not Mas Selamat.”

The authorities suspected that Noordin Top, a Jemaah Islamiyah militant from Malaysia, was hiding in Palembang in early 2007, and some analysts have said that he may have started a splinter terrorist group. He is believed to be responsible for several major bombings in Indonesia.

Jemaah Islamiyah has been blamed for most of the major attacks in Indonesia in recent years, including the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings that killed more than 200 people.

The militant wing of Jemaah Islamiyah, however, has been seriously weakened in recent years after the loss of several important leaders, including the group’s master bomb maker, Azhari Husin, who was killed in a shootout in 2005.

Indonesia’s success in fighting terrorism prompted the Bush administration to renew military ties with the country. And the State Department lifted a travel advisory last month that had warned Americans of possible terrorist attacks.

Australia, which has worked closely with Indonesia in its fight against the militant network, has refused to lift its travel warning for Indonesia, however, saying there is still evidence that terrorists are planning attacks.

Despite its setbacks, Jemaah Islamiyah has proven resilient. The group relies on a grassroots recruiting effort focused heavily on Indonesia’s many Islamic boarding schools. One of the suspects arrested Wednesday, Ms. Jones said, was the director of an Islamic school in Palembang.