Mumbai: Explosions shake India’s financial hub
July 12 (BBC) The BBC’s Rajini Vaidyanathan says the explosions happened in the middle of rush hour.
Mumbai: Explosions shake India’s financial hub
Three near-simultaneous explosions have shaken India’s commercial capital Mumbai (Bombay), police say.
Seventeen people were killed and 81 injured, said Maharashtra state’s chief minister Prithviraj Chavan.
He called the explosions, during Mumbai’s busy evening rush-hour, “a co-ordinated attack by terrorists”.
One explosion was reported in the Zaveri Bazaar, another in the Opera House business district and a third in Dadar district in the city centre.
Police sources were reported as saying the explosions were caused by home-made bombs.
The attacks are the worst in Mumbai since November 2008 when 10 gunmen launched a three-day co-ordinated raid in which 166 people were killed.
The BBC’s Soutik Biswas, in Delhi, says there is no evidence so far to suggest that Mumbai is under attack in the same way.
High alert
The latest explosions hit the city around 1900 (1330 GMT) as workers were making their way home.
Mumbai has been put on a state of high alert and a commando team is standing by, said Home Minister P Chidambaram.
Delhi, the capital, Calcutta and several other cities have also been put on alert. Mr Chidambaram urged people across the country to stay calm.
Forensics teams have been sent from Delhi and Hyderabad to examine the explosion sites.
The authorities have not yet said who they believe might be behind the explosions and no group has said it carried them out.
The blast in Zaveri Bazaar, a famous jewellery market in the south of Mumbai, was reported to have gone off in a shop, says the BBC’s Rajini Vaidyanathan in Mumbai.
One witness, photographer Rutavi Mehta, told the BBC he was shopping nearby and heard the explosion. He grabbed his camera and ran to the scene.
“I took a couple of photographs. I think they might be too graphic for broadcast,” he told the BBC.
“Bodies and limbs were strewn everywhere. People were crying and screaming. The area was packed with shoppers at the time of the blast. A few offered assistance to the blood-soaked victims, while others looked on in a state of shock,” he said.
“It was totally chaos. There were pools of blood everywhere.”
Another explosion hit the nearby Opera House district, at a time when it would have been crowded with workers and commuters.
The third blast in Dadar district, in the city centre, went off in a taxi next to a bus stop, reports say.
One eyewitness from the scene there told our correspondent he saw the bus stop and a car torn apart by the explosion.
According to some reports, the blasts came on the birthday of Mohammad Ajmal Amir Qasab, the sole surviving gunman from the 2008 attacks.
But BBC correspondents say court records show his birthday to be in September.
News Gathered by India News
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