Posted on 10/29/2005 10:58:52 AM PDT by indcons
A series of explosions rocked Delhi on Saturday evening, killing at least 65 people and leaving scores injured, some of them critically.
As many as 20 people have been killed in an explosion in Sarojini Nagar market and 15 others have reportedly been killed in Paharganj.
The markets were filled with shoppers doing their last-minute purchases for Diwali.
Most of those injured or killed in the explosions were ordinary people out shopping in the festival season.
Suspects detained
At least ten people have been detained following the three blasts in Delhi.
Five of them were picked up from the New Delhi Railway station and others from other railway stations and bus terminals.
It is now believed that high explosive devices suspected to be RDX were used in carrying out the blasts.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in a statement from Kolkata said the blasts are a clear case of terrorism.
"No terrorist can win against India. India will win the battle against terrorism," the Prime Minister said.
Red alert sounded
A red alert has been sounded across several places in the country including neighbouring Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Mumbai and Kolkata.
Home Minister Shivraj Patil called a high-level emergency meeting at 9 pm (IST) to review the situation and discuss security operations.
National Security Adviser, M K Naraynan, Cabinet Secretary B K Chaturvedi, Home Secretary V K Duggal and Delhi Chief Secretary S Regunathan also attended the meeting.
The Home Minister said it was too early to pinpoint who was responsible for the blasts.
"As to who is responsible for the blasts, we will not like to jump to any conclusion. The first priority is to give relief and succour to those affected by the blasts," the Home Minister said.
Congress President Sonia Gandhi visited the injured in hospitals. Extending her condolences to the families of those killed in the blasts, she described the incidents as acts of terrorism.
"Terrorism is a menace that we all have to face and fight together. This is not only a phenomenon here in our country. This is something that the whole world has to face. It is important that we all together fight it together," said Gandhi.
Series of blasts
People have been urged to remain calm and move away from crowded markets. Police have ordered all markets in the city to shut down.
The first blast took place in the main bazaar of Paharganj outside the New Delhi Railway Station at 5:38 pm (IST).
The explosion ripped apart the medical shop outside which the explosive device was planted in a two-wheeler.
Scores of people have been injured in the explosion, eyewitnesses said.
"I was talking to a client when the blast took place. The blast took place about 20 metres away. Right after the blast, people were running here and there," said Sajjan Singh, shopkeeper, Paharganj.
"My son was right behind me, he was injured in the head and in the smoke I couldn't see where he fell," said Joseph George, another shopkeeper.
The police later barricaded the area and a shop-to-shop search was carried out for any more explosives.
Innocents killed
Around half an hour later, at 6:05 pm (IST), the second explosion took place in the busy Sarojini Nagar market in south Delhi.
Diwali and Eid shoppers were making their last minute shopping when the bomb went off.
"There was a huge explosion as if LPG cylinders had gone off, it wasn't clear what happened. The market was very crowded," said an eyewitness.
Almost instantly, a fire broke out and spread quickly. Within minutes, the fire trucks reached the market and it took 45 minutes to bring the blaze under control.
"The market was completely crowded, there was no place to move. I was standing outside my shop when the blast took place. Ten people died immediately," said a shopkeeper.
Blast in Govindpuri
Another explosion was reported from Govindpuri in south Delhi. The explosion took place inside a bus, and four people have been critically injured.
There were at least 35-40 people travelling on a bus through Govindpuri when the conductor spotted a suspicious looking plastic bag on the bus that did not belong to any of the passengers.
He immediately asked all the passengers to get out of the bus.
"If it wasn't for the conductor and the driver, all the passengers would've died, I want to know what happened to them, I am grateful to them," said Afzal, an injured passenger.
There were just five people on board when the blast rattled the bus. But quick thinking and equally fast reaction of both the driver and the conductor saved the day for the passengers.
Both the driver and the conductor suffered injuries. The driver is in a critical state.
Reading about the heroic bus driver, now in critical condition, is the last straw for me. Tears just fill my eyes thinking of the suffering of innocent people, caused by muslim terrorists. And right after India offered to help the Pakistanis hurt and homeless from the earthquake, and were rebuffed.
I am sick to death of muslim terrorists and the supposedly non-terrorist muslims who do nothing to stop their brethren.
How much is going to have to happen before the vermin are destoyed?
See what happens when you open the border to Pakistan?
India opened the Kashmir border with Pakistan to aid in earthquake relief.
I hope the brave bus driver recovers completely. Praying for this great hero. He had the welfare of his passengers in mind till the very last minute (when the bomb exploded).
The Congress/Communist federal alliance in India has rushed the Indian Army to protect the muslims in Delhi and other places. See what happends when leftists rule a country :(
No goodwill and sympathy for the muslims. They need to be taught a lesson.
He obviously is referring to the current round. Other than the religiously-based warfare associated with the separation of India and Pakistan, there hasn't been a lot of Islamic "extremism" since the Mongols cleaned out the Sect of the Assassins (who were Persian Shiites, btw).
This time around, since AQ started up, India's had more or less observer status except in Kashmir, which goes back to Indo-Pak issues more than Wahhabi-generated ones. If you catch the distinction.
The issues between Delhi and Islamabad started on Mountbatten's desk, and the current round of worldwide terrorism on Bin Laden's and Zawahiri's.
So support for the Kashmiri terrorists by the Paki ISI under the previous governments was old business, whereas support for them by AQ is new business. It remains to be sorted out whether the motives behind these bombings were old or new business. If they're about Kashmir, they're old business. If they're AQ lashing out at the Indian government, to warn them off cooperating with the United States and the Europeans, then it's new business. Both are possible. The former is more likely, since it's already produced similar events over the last couple of years, including attacks on the Indian government itself.
Concurring bump, and kudos to the sharp-eyed bus conductor. He saved a lot of people.
You're right......BTW, the Congress/Communist alliance in India has rushed the Indian Army to muslim areas to protect them from retailiation. Disgusting behavior by the Indian leftists.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1511669/posts?page=26#26
...well said! We give "new" events and what is behind them a little time to soak in elsewhere, no? Our own national concerns and observations can be strange to many who are presented with other faces and names of terrorism from one general movement. ...as what they see from the same movement can be strange to us.
"But go ahead. Indians were accustomed to such condescending remarks when India was colonized by people who were condenscending and worse "
Oh boy - are we ticklish...
Sounds like you carry a lot of psychological 'baggage'
Sixty million...? That's 100,000 per year, continuous average, over 600 years. Sounds wildly over the top. Can you point me to a source?
No, I hadn't heard of the place-names or events you mention.
From this article, Was There an Islamic "Genocide" of Hindus? by Dr. Koenraad Elst (From http://koenraadelst.voiceofdharma.com/articles/irin/genocide.html )
Hinduism's losses
There is no official estimate of the total death toll of Hindus at the hands of Islam. A first glance at important testimonies by Muslim chroniclers suggests that, over 13 centuries and a territory as vast as the Subcontinent, Muslim Holy Warriors easily killed more Hindus than the 6 million of the Holocaust. Ferishtha lists several occasions when the Bahmani sultans in central India (1347-1528) killed a hundred thousand Hindus, which they set as a minimum goal whenever they felt like "punishing" the Hindus; and they were only a third-rank provincial dynasty. The biggest slaughters took place during the raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi (ca. 1000 CE); during the actual conquest of North India by Mohammed Ghori and his lieutenants (1192 ff.); and under the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526). The Moghuls (1526-1857), even Babar and Aurangzeb, were fairly restrained tyrants by comparison. Prof. K.S. Lal once estimated that the Indian population declined by 50 million under the Sultanate, but that would be hard to substantiate; research into the magnitude of the damage Islam did to India is yet to start in right earnest.
Note that attempts are made to deny this history. In Indian schoolbooks and the media, an idyllic picture of Hindu-Muslim harmony in the pre-British period is propagated in outright contradiction with the testimony of the primary sources. Like Holocaust denial, this propaganda can be called negationism. The really daring negationists don't just deny the crimes against Hindus, they invert the picture and blame the Hindus themselves. Thus, it is routinely alleged that Hindus persecuted and destroyed Buddhism; in reality, Buddhist monasteries and universities flourished under Hindu rule, but their thousands of monks were killed by Ghori and his lieutenants.
Apart from actual killing, millions of Hindus disappeared by way of enslavement. After every conquest by a Muslim invader, slave markets in Bagdad and Samarkand were flooded with Hindus. Slaves were likely to die of hardship, e.g. the mountain range Hindu Koh, "Indian mountain", was renamed Hindu Kush, "Hindu-killer", when one cold night in the reign of Timur Lenk (1398-99), a hundred thousand Hindu slaves died there while on transport to Central Asia. Though Timur conquered Delhi from another Muslim ruler, he recorded in his journal that he made sure his pillaging soldiers spared the Muslim quarter, while in the Hindu areas, they took "twenty slaves each". Hindu slaves were converted to Islam, and when their descendants gained their freedom, they swelled the numbers of the Muslim community. It is a cruel twist of history that the Muslims who forced Partition on India were partly the progeny of Hindus enslaved by Islam.
Thank you. A study of the British Mandate and events surrounding it might go well with that information. It shows much about alliances between empires and Islamic rulers.
British Mandate for Palestine (WW I to 1948)
http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_mandate.php
But will India DO anything? Spain surrendered. Italy talked alot but did....what? Italy should have sent a few divisions to Iraq to kci some butt. India needs to throw its weight around. Talk is cheap.
India is neck-deep fighting terror in Kashmir, since '89. No other nation came forward to help her in that still-ongoing war, in fact, most nations, and that includes pre-9-11 America, were more concerned about "human rights abuses" by the Indian troops.
Arrive 9-11, and all that changed in an instant.
Right now, barring the occasional incidents, Kashmir is relatively safe, compared to the living hell it was through the years between '89 and '94.
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