India links Mumbai blasts to home-grown militants

No one has claimed responsibility for the rush-hour bombings that ripped through the Opera House diamond trading hub, Zaveri Bazaar gold and jewellery quarter and the suburban district of Dadar.

But Home minister P. Chidambaram told parliament on Thursday evening that even though a police investigation into the July 13 attacks was still ongoing “all indications point to (an) Indian module”.

“We cannot live in denial. We cannot close our eyes to facts. There are home-grown modules,” he told the upper house of parliament the Rajya Sabha in a debate.

Chidambaram had previously cast investigative net far wider, saying that all outfits “hostile to India” were being treated as possible suspects.

Suspicion has fallen on the Indian Mujahideen, a shadowy group of domestic militants that have carried out similar attacks in the past, including in the capital New Delhi and the western city of Ahmedabad in 2008.

They were also thought to be behind a restaurant bombing in the western city of Pune in February 2010 that killed 16.

The Indian Mujahideen is believed to have links with the outlawed, Pakistan-based Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).

Last month’s bombings were the first attack on Mumbai since 10 Islamist militants killed 166 and wounded over 300 in November 2008.

India blamed that assault on the LeT and suspended a peace dialogue with arch-rival Pakistan that only formally resumed earlier this year.

Chidambaram told lawmakers that India was not exempt from the rise of militant forces across the world, as opposition leaders accused the minister of being soft on extremism.

He accepted that domestic extremists threatened the country’s unity and recognised that the Pune blast in 2010 and the latest attack in Mumbai were “two major blots” on the counter-terrorism fight.

Anti-terror police in Mumbai have said they have “good leads” in the case and have questioned two suspected Indian Mujahideen operatives arrested earlier in connection with the 2008 Ahmedabad blasts.

Detectives say they are keeping an open mind and have questioned people with what the government has said are “previous known linkages” to the underworld. No arrests have been made.

Officials admitted early on in the investigation that driving monsoon rains that lashed Mumbai had hindered the collection of key forensic clues.

Home-grown extremist groups in India are not limited to Islamist militants but often get less media coverage.

Maoist-inspired rebels have become what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh believes is India’s most serious internal security threat, with support for their armed insurgency spreading to rural areas in many states.

Government groups and law enforcement agencies are frequent targets of the rebels, who feed off land disputes, police brutality and corruption that hit the country’s poorest people.

Hardline Hindu groups have also been responsible for sporadic attacks, including a September 2008 bombing in a crowded market near a mosque in Malegaon, some 175 miles (280 kilometres) northeast of Mumbai.

Seven people were killed and at least 80 others wounded. Twelve people are currently awaiting trial.

Hindu extremists are also accused of being behind a wave of bombings, also in Malegaon, in 2006-7 which killed at least 115 people.