A powerful bomb hidden in a briefcase ripped through a busy crowd outside New Delhi's High Court on Wednesday, killing 11 people and injuring 66, many of them petitioners waiting for legal hearings. The device had been placed near an entrance gate reception area, where more than 100 people were queueing for passes to the court complex, located in the heart of the Indian capital.
It was the first major attack on Indian soil since triple blasts in Mumbai on July 13 killed 26 people. It has still not been established who carried out those bombings. "A total of 11 people have been confirmed dead and 66 injured," Delhi police spokesman Rajan Bhagat said, adding that sketches of two suspects were being prepared from eye-witness accounts.
Investigators said they were also probing an emailed claim of responsibility purportedly sent from Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (HuJI). Grisly mobile phone footage from the immediate aftermath of the blast was broadcast by television news channels showing screaming victims on the ground surrounded by scattered files and bloody limbs.
"More than 100 people were in a queue at the reception," Rahul Gupta, a petitioner whose case was listed for a hearing on Wednesday, told AFP at the scene, where the blast left a crater in the ground. "There was a huge explosion. I saw a lot of people lying around in a pool of blood." Condemning the attack, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said India would not be cowed by terrorism.
"This is a cowardly act of a terrorist nature," Singh, who is on a visit to Bangladesh, told television reporters in Dhaka. "This is a long war in which all political parties, all the people of India, have to stand united so that this scourge of terrorism is crushed."
The email being studied by investigators warned that other courts would be targeted unless authorities repealed the death sentence on a man convicted for conspiring in a 2001 militant attack on India's parliament. "It would be very premature to make any comment on the mail at this stage, but yes that mail has to be looked at seriously because HuJI is a very prominent terrorist group," S.C. Sinha, director general of India's National Investigation Agency, told reporters.
HuJI militants have been active in Pakistan and India, while an affiliate group exists in Bangladesh. One lawyer inside the court told AFP he was working in his office when the bomb detonated. "I was in my chambers when I heard a huge explosion and the windows in my room were blown in," M.I. Chowdhary said.
"People were carrying the injured away. Some of them looked horribly hurt. "That time is peak hour for petitioners and other people getting their entry passes at the reception area. So it seems somebody had timed it to cause maximum casualties." "Security is really not up to the mark," Chowdhary said. "It needs to be tightened around such a sensitive target."
The last bombs in the Indian capital were in September 2008, when a series of blasts in several upmarket shopping areas killed 22 people and injured nearly 100. A home-grown militant outfit called the Indian Mujahideen claimed it was behind that attack. India has made efforts to improve domestic security since the 2008 Mumbai attacks, in which 10 Islamist gunmen laid siege to the city, killing 166 people.
But experts say security forces still suffer from weak grassroots intelligence gathering. "Indian agencies get warnings every day, but we simply don't have the capabilities to prevent attacks on soft targets - that would require a high degree of intelligence penetration," said Ajai Sahni, director of the Delhi-based Institute for Conflict ManaReuters
The High Court has been targeted before. In May this year a low-intensity device was set off in the parking lot but there were no casualties and only minimal damage. Other recent bombings include a blast in February last year at a packed restaurant in the western city of Pune which killed 16 people including several foreigners.