No breakthrough in India bomb probe, police say

MUMBAI - Indian police officers scoured Mumbai's slums and largely Muslim ghettos today, looking for suspects in last week's railway network bombings, but were no closer to a breakthrough yet, police said.

Hundreds of people, mostly minority Muslims, have been questioned and dozens detained since the July 11 blasts on crowded commuter trains and platforms that killed 181 people and wounded hundreds.

But no formal arrests have been made so far in the incident that has set back a budding rapprochement between nuclear-armed rivals, Indian and Pakistan.

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

An angry New Delhi has put off peace talks with Islamabad, saying Pakistan was not doing enough to stop the activities of anti-India militants on its soil.

Islamabad has denied any connection with the Mumbai bombings.

"There are leads. Some are still being pursued; some have yielded no results," a senior officer involved in the investigations said on condition of anonymity.

"The raids will continue. Muslim-dominated areas are under our scanner," the officer said.

Indian President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam visits Mumbai tomorrow to visit those wounded in the seven rail explosions.

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

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.

Though no breakthrough has been officially announced or anybody named, Indian media published photographs of two people they said were among the leading suspects and who had fled the country.

Police said they were also scanning people who had returned from the Persian Gulf region in the recent past.

"Investigations proceed in many directions. We can't give you details of those now," Mumbai police chief A.N. Roy said.

Earlier today, officials had said they expected a breakthrough in investigations within a week.

Police officers said they were also probing an email sent to an Indian TV channel from a group calling itself "Laskhar-e-Qahhar (Army of Fury)", claiming it was behind the attacks.

In the email, it said the attacks were reprisals for Indian rule in Kashmir and the 2002 riots in the western state of Gujarat where over 1000 people were killed, mostly Muslims.

Newspapers said besides cracking down on local supporters and facilitators of Islamist militant groups among India's 130-million-plus Muslims, New Delhi should uplift the economic status of one of the country's poorest communities.

"Equally important, but even more difficult, is the second response: change the incentive calculus of the young people (mostly men) who form the recruitment pool for terror's headhunters," The Indian Express wrote in an editorial.

"Young men with jobs in humdrum bourgeois settings don't usually chuck it all for a career that promises murder as the highest achievement."

- REUTERS