India Blames Pakistan for Bombay Bomb Attacks

Tensions on the Indian subcontinent were growing last night after India blamed its neighbour Pakistan for Monday's bomb attacks in the centre of Bombay which killed at least 50 people.

India's hardline deputy prime minister, LK Advani, yesterday toured the Gateway of India, Bombay's most famous tourist attraction, where one of the bombs exploded, and claimed that the blasts were the work of Lashkar-i-Toiba, an Islamist militant group based in Pakistan.

Pointing the finger of blame squarely at Islamabad, India's nuclear rival, he said: "I would say our neighbour's war of terrorism against us is not directed only against Jammu and Kashmir," a reference to the disputed state which has traditionally been a target.

He also claimed that Pakistan had sheltered several of the underworld dons responsible for a series of 1993 bombings that killed at least 260 people and had refused to hand them over to India.

Pakistan was now involved in a wider campaign to destabilise India, he said.

Mr Advani's unambiguous comments are likely to plunge relations between India and Pakistan into fresh crisis.

A Pakistani foreign ministry statement called Mr Advani's comments "baseless and irresponsible", adding: "It serves no purpose to point accusing fingers towards Pakistan and even worse to try to make domestic political capital from such a gruesome tragedy."

Earlier Mr Advani claimed that local police had recovered the bodies of two Pakistani nationals involved in a previous bomb attack in Bombay.

But Indian detectives appeared to have made little progress in identifying who was responsible, despite several arrests. They are hunting for five suspects, including two women, who are believed to have planted the bomb at the Gateway of India.

The suspects hired a taxi for a day, and told the driver to wait in a car park near the Taj Mahal Hotel. They vanished, leaving a bag behind. Detectives are now interviewing their driver, who had gone for lunch at the time of the blast. The driver of the other taxi which exploded was killed.

India stepped up security across the country to prevent communal clashes between Hindus and Muslims following the bombings.

Many blame the bombings on extremists possibly avenging the deaths of 2,000 Muslims killed in riots last year in Gujarat; officials implicated a banned Indian Islamic student group. Chaggan Bhujpal, the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra state, which contains Bombay, said the blasts and the Gujarat riots were linked and blamed "Pakistan-based terrorism groups", working with "locals".

India's respected liberal newspaper, the Hindu, said the attacks should be blamed on "politicians who have built their career on hate" - an apparent swipe at hardliners within the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP party.