13 Die In Blast At Historic Indian Mosque

A bomb ripped through a historic south India mosque Friday, and 13 people were killed — 11 in the blast and two in subsequent clashes between angry Muslim worshippers and security forces, police said.

Minutes after the blast at the 17th-century Mecca Masjid, worshippers who were angered by what they said was a lack of police protection began chanting "God is great!" Some hurled stones at police, who dispersed them with baton charges and tear gas.

While the situation at the mosque was quickly brought under control, Muslims later clashed with security forces in at least three parts of Hyderabad, said Mohammed Abdul Basit, police chief of Andhra Pradesh state, where Hyderabad is located. Police fired live ammunition and tear gas to quell the riots, killing two people, he said.

The bombing, which killed 11 people and wounded 35, and clashes raised fears of wider Hindu-Muslim violence in the city, which has long been plagued by communal tensions and occasional spasms of inter-religious bloodletting.

Many of those injured in the explosion at the Mecca Masjid were severely wounded, and the city's police chief, Balwinder Singh, warned the death toll could rise.

Soon after the blast, Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh state, where Hyderabad is located, appealed for calm between Hindus and Muslims.

"This is an intentional sabotage on the peace and tranquility of the state," Reddy said of the bombing. "Every sane person has to unequivocally condemn this sort of incident. ... I take this opportunity to appeal to everyone concerned to show restraint."

Reddy told reporters in New Delhi, where he was meeting with federal officials on unrelated business, that one bomb went off around 1:30 p.m. local time and that police soon after found and defused two other bombs in the area of the mosque.

The bomb, made of a stick-grenade packed into a metal pipe, was detonated by a mobile phone attached to the device, said the state's police chief, Mohammed Abdul Basit.

Neither he nor any other officials gave any indication of who they suspected in the attack.

About 10,000 people usually attend Friday prayers at the mosque, located in a Muslim neighborhood of Hyderabad. The explosion sparked a panic.

"I was very close to the spot of the blast," said Abdul Quader, a 30-year-old who sustained light injuries to his legs.

"As soon as prayers ended, we were about to get up, there was a huge deafening blast sending bodies into the air," he continued. "People stated running helter-skelter, there was such confusion. People were bleeding, running around in a very bad condition."

Worshippers in white robes and skullcaps, many bent in prayer, initially appeared bewildered by the explosion before rushing out of the historic structure as startled pigeons fluttered about inside the stone-and-marble mosque.

The independent NDTV news channel broadcast video taken inside the mosque as the blast went off. A loud noise is heard, and pieces of masonry can be seen flying through the air.

The explosion immediately drew comparisons to a September bombing of a mosque during a Muslim festival in Maleagaon, a city in western India. That attack killed 31 people and was seen as an attempt to inflame tensions between India's Hindu majority and Muslim minority. There are an estimated 130 million Muslims in India, a country of 1.1 billion people.

Relations between Hindus, more than 80 percent of India's population, and Muslims, its largest religious minority, have been largely peaceful since the bloody partition of the subcontinent into India and Muslim Pakistan at independence from Britain in 1947. However, there have been sporadic bouts of violence.

The worst in recent years came in 2002, in the western state of Gujarat. More than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed by Hindu mobs after a train fire killed 60 Hindus returning from a religious pilgrimage. Muslims were blamed for the train fire.

Hyderabad, a city of 7 million people, about 40 percent of whom are Muslim, has also had its share of communal violence.

Five people were killed and 27 wounded in Hindu-Muslim clashes in 2003. The fighting began when Muslims marked the anniversary of the destruction of the 16th-century Babri Mosque by Hindu extremists in northern India in 1992.

The city was tense as dusk fell Friday, with Muslims blaming Hindus for the latest attack.

"I don't have any doubts that this is an act of Hindu terrorists," said Saleem Uddin, a 35-year-old businessman who lives near the Mecca Masjid.

He spoke of the bombing of the mosque in Malegaon, and complained bitterly that authorities have blamed Muslim extremists for that attack but provided only limited evidence.

Apart from the two mosque bombings, a series of blasts have hit India in the past year, including the July bombings of seven Mumbai commuter trains that killed more than 200 people.

Most of the bombings have been blamed on Muslim militants based in neighboring Pakistan, India's longtime rival.

The Hyderabad bombing came the same day a judge in Mumbai began sentencing those convicted of involvement in India's worst terror attack, the 1993 Mumbai serial bombings that killed 257 people.

The bombings were believed to have been acts of revenge by Muslims for the demolition of the Babri Mosque and ensuing riots that left more than 800 dead, most of them Muslims.