Police defused 18 bombs found near the main diamond markets in the city of Surat and issued a sketch of a young man believed to be linked to one of two explosives-filled cars discovered there.
The announcement on Tuesday came as authorities in a Mumbai suburb probed ties to a series of blasts over the weekend that killed 42 people and wounded 183 in Ahmadabad, about 280km north of Surat. An obscure Islamic militant group claimed responsibility for the Ahmadabad attack.
“I request you not to go to crowded places unnecessarily,” Surat Police Commissioner R.M.S. Brar told the public during a news conference, according to the Press Trust of India news agency.
Authorities said four cars — two used in Saturday’s Ahmadabad attack and the two found in Surat on Tuesday — were stolen this month from a Mumbai suburb, Navi Mumbai.
“Once we find the people who stole the cars, it will give us further clues about the blasts,” Navi Mumbai police chief Ramrao Wagh said.
Police said they believe the bombers used Navi Mumbai as the headquarters to plan the attack because they believed their activities would likely go undetected in the nondescript suburb.
India has been hit repeatedly by bombings in recent years. Nearly all have been blamed on Islamic rebels, who allegedly want to provoke violence between India’s Hindu majority and Muslim minority, although officials rarely offer hard evidence implicating specific groups.
Meanwhile, in the neighboring state of Rajasthan, police defused three crude bombs hidden inside plastic containers in a village about 300km north of Jaipur, said Harilal Sharma, a senior police official.
The latest developments come just days after 22 bombs tore through the historic city of Ahmadabad in Gujarat state in western India on Saturday.
The death toll has been lowered to 42 from 45 because several cases were reported twice amid the confusion, said H.P. Singh, a senior Ahmadabad police officer.
Authorities were also investigating on Tuesday the computer of a 48-year-old US citizen living in Mumbai to find out if an e-mail claiming responsibility for the attack was sent from it, or if unknown attackers accessed his wireless Internet connection.
Police seized Kenneth Haywood’s computer on Monday after tracing an e-mail claiming responsibility for the attack to the machine.
Police said on Tuesday that Haywood was not a suspect and it appeared the bombers had accessed his wireless network connection to send the e-mail.
Singh said anyone on the two floors below Haywood’s 15th floor apartment could have accessed his network.
It is usually a serene two-and-a-half-hour ride on Japan’s famously efficient bullet train, but on Saturday, the journey quickly descended into a zombie apocalypse, with passengers screaming in terror. Organizers of the adrenaline-filled trip, less than two weeks before Halloween, touted it as the world’s first haunted house experience on a running Shinkansen. On board one chartered car of the Shinkansen, about 40 thrill-seekers were ready to brave an encounter with the living dead between Tokyo and the western metropolis of Osaka. The eerie experience was inspired by the hit 2016 South Korean action-horror movie Train to Busan, in which a father and
The space rock that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period caused a global calamity that doomed the dinosaurs and many other life forms, but that was far from the largest meteorite to strike our planet. One up to 200 times bigger landed 3.26 billion years ago, triggering worldwide destruction at an even greater scale, but as new research shows, that disaster actually might have been beneficial for the early evolution of life by serving as “a giant fertilizer bomb” for the bacteria and other single-celled organisms called archaea that held dominion at the
PROPAGANDA: The leaflets attacked the South Korean president and first lady with phrases such as: ‘It’s fortunate that President Yoon and his wife have no children’ North Korean propaganda leaflets apparently carried by balloons were found scattered on the streets of the South Korean capital, Seoul, yesterday, including some making personal attacks on the country’s president and first lady. The leaflets attacking South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and first lady Kim Keon-hee found in the capital appear to be the first instance of the North Korean government directly sending anti-South propaganda material across the border. They included graphic messages accusing the Yoon government of failures that had left his people living in despair, and describing the first couple as immoral and mentally unstable. The leaflets included photographs of the
NEW RECRUITS: A video released by Ukrainian officials allegedly shows dozens of North Koreans lining up to collect military fatigues from Russian servicemen Russian aerial strikes wounded more than a dozen and knocked out electricity for tens of thousands of Ukrainians overnight in attacks on residential areas as temperatures dropped toward freezing, Kyiv said yesterday. Ukraine also said it had targeted a crucial Russian explosives factory, about 750km from the border, in an overnight drone attack, while Moscow said it had shot down 110 drones, the largest attempted aerial barrage by Kyiv in more than two weeks. At least 17 people were wounded in an attack on Kryvyi Rig, Ukraine, including a first responder, the Ukrainian State Emergency Service said. “At night, the enemy attacked Kryvyi