Sophisticated attacks catch security agencies napping

New Delhi: The sophistication of a wave of bomb attacks in India has caught the country's police and intelligence networks napping, and suggests militants may have received training abroad.

At least 46 people were killed in a succession of bomb blasts since Friday, most of them in the communally sensitive city of Ahmadabad in the western state of Gujarat, apparently in revenge for the 2002 communal riots there.

Planned

"There was a high level of sophistication in the way these attacks were planned and orchestrated," said B. Raman, a former head of India's external spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). "The people who did it have a lot of expertise."

Reports suggest the internet address of an American living in Mumbai was hacked to send an email just five minutes before the first bombs exploded in Ahmadabad, warning on behalf of a group called the Indian Mujahideen.

An earlier email sent by the group before May's attacks in Jaipur had been traced to a cybercafe, a method also used to track down Daniel Pearl's kidnappers in Pakistan in 2002. This time the sender of the email may prove harder to trace.

Integrated circuits were used to detonate the Bangalore bombs, technology which requires expertise and training.

The bombers also stayed one step ahead of the police by not using mobile phones to detonate Saturday's blasts, as they had in the past. That allowed the bombers to detonate a second set of bombs without having to worry about the mobile phone network being closed down, as police in Bangalore did on Friday.

'Unquestionable' role

The Indian Mujahideen says "each and every Mujahid belongs to this very soil of India". But Ajai Sahni of the Institute for Conflict Management sees the hand of Pakistan's spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), a charge Islamabad denies.

"The ISI role in supporting these groups, and in facilitating and resourcing these groups is unquestionable, as is a great deal of communications chatter between cadres and operatives in India and ISI handlers in Pakistan," he said.

Manhunt launched

Police launched a massive manhunt in India's financial capital yesterday, believing that the serial blasts that rocked the western Indian city of Ahmadabad over the weekend, killing 45 people, were hatched in a Mumbai suburb.

Four cars used in the weekend bombings were stolen from in the suburb of Navi Mumbai - "New Mumbai" police said.

Meanwhile, police yesterday found 10 unexploded bombs in Surat, a city 280 kilometers south of Ahmadabad, H.P. Singh, a senior police officer, said.