Indian police yesterday planned to release sketches of suspects behind New Delhi bombings that left more than 20 dead, as criticism grew over the lack of a coherent national counterterrorism policy.
Karnal Singh, a senior police official investigating the five bombs that ripped through crowded markets in the Indian capital on Saturday, said several people had been taken in for questioning but no arrests had been made.
The attacks were claimed by the Indian Mujahideen, a shadowy Muslim militant group that also owned responsibility for bombings in July that killed at least 45 people in the cities of Ahmedabad and Bangalore.
“We hope to release suspect sketches today,” Singh said.
The Delhi blasts were the fourth in a major Indian city in as many months and have refueled debate over the ability of the security and intelligence forces to prevent such attacks and bring those responsible to justice.
“We are at war,” was the blunt assessment of an editorial in the Times of India. “When a country is at war, there cannot be any half measures to hit back and contain the enemy.”
The newspaper said the time had come for India’s political parties to cast aside their differences and “put their heads together to figure out a counter-strategy for which consensus will be essential.”
In 2004, India’s new Congress-led government scrapped an anti-terror law introduced by its Hindu nationalist predecessor after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The Congress argued that the legislation, which gave sweeping powers to the police, was being misused to settle political scores.
At the time, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh vowed that repealing the law would not weaken the government’s ability to combat terrorism, but the recent spate of attacks has challenged that assertion.
“More than four years into its term, the government’s record on this account is looking even more shocking,” the Indian Express newspaper said.
“They have simply not done enough to bring closure to any of the terrorist incidents of the past four years, to follow leads thoroughly, to crack the organizations behind the incidents,” the Express said.
The Hindustan Times accused the government and the opposition of being too willing to “woefully sacrifice national consensus against a common enemy” at the altar of political one-upmanship.
“Going by the way we conduct our post-attack investigations and put into place barriers against future attacks, one would be forgiven for thinking we are new to terrorism,” it said.
Police said the death toll from Saturday’s blasts had risen to 22.
The toll could have been higher as three more bombs were defused, including a device found near India Gate, a major tourist attraction in the heart of Delhi.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS