Mumbai March 13. 2003 India

Central train station, Victoria Terminus.
A bombing on a Bombay commuter train at 2045 Indian Standard Time on 13 March killed at least 10 people and injured between 50 and 90 people. The device was hidden in an overhead luggage bin in the ladies compartment and detonated as the train pulled into Mulund station, which is located in a northern suburban area of the city. Although most press reports say the damage was caused by a single bomb, some have reported two simultaneous explosions in the passenger compartments. The 13 March blast is the latest in a series of bombings in and around train stations in Bombay. On 2 December 2002, 2 people were killed in an explosion in a BEST bus outside Ghatkopar railway station. It was followed by a blast in a McDonald’s outlet at Bombay Central railway station on December 6, in which 25 people were injured. On January 28, a bomb concealed in a bag of wheat on a bicycle went off in the Vile Parle market outside the local railway station, injuring 30 people. No group has claimed responsibility for the 13 March attack or the three previous ones. However, some Indian police officials are speculating that a domestic group, the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), carried out the bombing. Local police previously implicated SIMI in the Ghatkopar bombing in December. In New Delhi, police also arrested several of the group’s leaders on ‘terrorism’ charges on 12 March. Meanwhile, police and state officials are speculating on the timing of the latest Bombay bombing, which comes a day after the 10th anniversary of a series of blasts that killed approximately 300 people across the city in 1993. Those blasts were attributed to international mafia don, Dawood Ibrahim, who allegedly ordered them in retribution for an anti-Muslim pogrom in Bombay that followed the December 1992 destruction of a mosque at Ayodhya by Hindu extremists. Photographed 27 April 2005.

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