Defiant Mumbai returns to work after bombings

MUMBAI - Millions of people in India's financial capital have returned to work a day after a wave of bombings, as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said the country would not kneel to terrorism.

Investigators said they had prepared sketches of three suspects seen at some of the sites of the seven coordinated bomb blasts that killed at least 186 people. Suspicion fell on Pakistan-based militants fighting Indian rule in Kashmir.

Tuesday's attacks (Wednesday morning NZT), on crowded rush-hour railway carriages and stations, seemed to have been aimed at the heart of India's economic success story, but just hours later the city's residents were back at work and the stock market was steady.

"This is living proof of our contempt for terrorism," Singh said in an address to the nation. "No one can make India kneel. No one can come in the path of our progress.

"We will win this war against terror," he added. "Nothing will break our resolve."

Around 700 people were wounded when the bombs blew apart railway carriages and stations packed with rush-hour commuters in the space of just 11 minutes.

"It's a little scary, but we have no option to go back to work," said Amita Rane, a 24-year-old chartered accountant.

The death toll was the worst since a series of bombs killed more than 250 in Mumbai in 1993. The attacks were also eerily reminiscent of serial bomb blasts on commuter rail networks in Madrid and London in the past two years.

"In my view the Mumbai bombers could have been inspired by the London and Madrid attacks," said Peter Lehr at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University.

"It is an attempt to instil fear and terror in the minds of the people and spark a new wave of communal violence among Hindus and Muslims. In this they have miserably failed."

Survivors' lists

Yesterday relatives and friends of victims were still poring over survivors' lists at city hospitals or trying to identify charred and mutilated corpses. Others were inside the wards, tending to the injured lying on blood-soaked beds.

In the state-run King Edward Memorial Hospital, a woman cried inconsolably after seeing the half-burnt face of her critically wounded husband.

"That cannot be him, that cannot be him. It cannot happen to him," she wailed.

Police said they had conducted several raids in and around Mumbai in the search for the perpetrators.

"We have leads on three people who were lurking around, and on the basis of that we have prepared sketches," Sanjeev Dayal, a senior state police officer, told Reuters.

Security was stepped up at railway stations, parks, markets and religious institutions across the country to prevent further attacks and possible violence between Hindus and Muslims.

But instead of violence, there was a rare show of harmony between the two communities. Muslims queued for hours in Mumbai to give blood to their Hindu neighbours, and also helped injured Hindus to hospitals and gave relatives cups of tea.

The explosions happened hours after a series of grenade attacks on tourists in Srinagar, capital of Indian Kashmir, which killed eight people. Another grenade explosion at a mountain resort in Kashmir on Wednesday wounded five more tourists.

Police in Kashmir blamed the attacks there on the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group, which authorities say is backed by Pakistan and was also behind bomb blasts in crowded markets in New Delhi last October that killed more than 60.

Newspapers quoted unnamed security sources as naming Lashkar as the prime suspect for the Mumbai blasts, but the group denied any role in the "inhuman and barbaric acts".

- REUTERS