India holds 11 as blast probe makes slow progress

MUMBAI - Indian authorities have detained 11 people, mostly Muslims, as the hunt for the Mumbai bombers produced several leads, but police warned about drawing premature conclusions.

Panic gripped the city anew on Saturday evening when trains were stopped for over an hour and commuters evacuated after a bomb threat at a northern Mumbai suburban station. The threat was declared a hoax after a search, police said.

In a dawn swoop, police rounded up about 300 people from central Mumbai's Mahim neighbourhood, but allowed all but 11 of them to go after questioning.

"Those held have some kind of criminal record. So we want to run more checks on them," a senior police officer told Reuters.

About 400 officers are hunting those behind Tuesday's [early Wednesday NZT] serial bombing of commuter trains and stations in the Indian financial hub that killed 179 people and wounded nearly 700.

Indian officials have said Pakistan-based Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) are the prime suspects.

But they believe Indian Muslims could have carried out the bombings, possibly members or former members of the Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), banned in 2001 for allegedly trying to stir religious unrest over the US-led war on terror and which is thought to have links with Lashkar.

"Let investigations finish and then we will tell you whether it was the Lashkar or SIMI or some other group or Lashkar and SIMI together," K.P. Raghusvanshi, Mumbai's anti-terrorism squad chief, told reporters.

Lashkar has long operated in troubled Indian-ruled Kashmir, but is believed to have expanded its area of operations.

The group has denied any role in the blasts, calling the attacks "inhuman and barbaric".

On Friday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh accused Pakistan of breaking its word by continuing to harbour Islamist extremists, and said peace talks with Islamabad would be threatened if it did not curb "terrorist" violence directed at India.

Pakistan has denied any involvement in the serial bombings.

Shyam Saran, the country's top foreign ministry bureaucrat, said on Saturday it was getting "difficult" for India to continue with the peace process.

" ... I think it would be fair to say that as a result of these terrible terrorist incidents, it is becoming difficult to take this process forward," Saran said.

He said India had not decided on the dates of a meeting between the foreign secretaries of the two countries to review the peace process.

Indian newspapers and television channels published photographs of two people they said were among the leading suspects and had fled the country, but police have yet to name a suspect or arrest anyone.

Media reports, quoting unnamed intelligence officials, also named a man believed to be the main conspirator of the blast, who they said was a Lashkar operative and could be hiding in a safe house in Kathmandu.

Two Pakistanis were arrested in the Nepali capital hours after the Mumbai explosions, but police said those arrests were not directly linked to the events in Mumbai.

Other reports said at least two of the bombers were Bangladeshi nationals and the consignment of explosives used could have been smuggled into India through the border in the eastern state of West Bengal.

- REUTERS