Terrorism India

Car bombers struck savagely in the heart of middle-class New Delhi at sunset Tuesday, setting off a devastating blast at a busy shopping area that killed at least 16 people and wounded 45 others, police said. The powerful explosion, which touched off fires that gutted a four-story building and more than 10 market stalls, came two days before parliamentary elections are to be held in Muslim-majority areas of the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Kashmiri separatists detonated a car bomb in Srinagar on Monday, killing at least 13 people in an audacious attack in the center of the heavily fortified city, witnesses said. The Hizbul Mujaheddin guerrilla group said in a statement delivered to news organizations that it was responsible for the explosion outside the government-run State Bank of India building. The statement said a mine had been planted in a military vehicle with the help of army soldiers and was detonated by remote control.

In India's highest-level political assassination in four years, Beant Singh, chief minister of Punjab state, was killed Thursday when a powerful bomb exploded as he got into his limousine. A Sikh separatist group claimed responsibility for the blast, which killed 12 others. The explosion occurred after Singh, 73, left his second-floor office in the civil secretariat in Chandigarh, the city that serves as Punjab's administrative capital. As the chief minister got into his car at 5:07 p.m.

As India celebrated its birthday as a republic, three powerful bombs exploded Thursday at a holiday rally in the disputed state of Kashmir, killing at least seven people and wounding 52 others but sparing the apparent target, state Gov. K.V. Krishna Rao, police said. Rao, a retired Indian army general, was addressing a crowd of about 15,000 people at a stadium in the city of Jammu, the northern state's winter capital, when the explosions began at 10:20 a.m.

Indian authorities, basking Tuesday in the liberation of one American and three British tourists who had been held hostage--one for more than a month--implicated enemy neighbor Pakistan in the abductions. Muslim militants seized the Westerners in New Delhi after winning their confidence with bogus stories. They then threatened to behead them if fighters jailed for combatting Indian rule in the predominantly Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir were not freed.

The armed struggle over Kashmir reached into India's capital Monday when a militant Muslim group announced it had kidnaped an American and three Britons here and would behead them, one after the other, unless the Indian government freed 10 of the captors' jailed "brothers." "Our hostages are as yet unhurt," claimed the little-known group, which identified itself as Al Hadid. "Whether they remain that way is the sole responsibility of the Indian government."

Bombs rocked five express trains racing across India on Monday, killing one passenger and injuring at least 20 others as the country warily marked the first year since the destruction of a mosque by a swarm of Hindu militants. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks, but authorities had been bracing for violence linked to the anniversary of the razing of Babri Masjid, a 16th-Century mosque, in the north Indian town of Ayodhya on Dec. 6, 1992.

A car bomb exploded in central New Delhi on Saturday in an apparent attempt to assassinate a top politician crippled in a similar attack last year. He escaped with shrapnel wounds to the chest, but at least eight people were killed and 36 wounded. The blast occurred at midday as Maninder Singh Bitta, 35, president of the governing Congress Party's youth wing, left his office in a car. His two bodyguards were among the dead, police said.

When the Cold War was iciest, Pakistan "agreed to play America's game," a senior Pakistani official explained here recently. The game was partly cloak and dagger. In the late 1950s, the United States secretly based spy planes in western Pakistan, including the famed U-2 shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960 with pilot Francis Gary Powers.