Militant Group Claims Bombings

New Delhi Blasts Kill 59, Authorities Search For Clues

(CBS/AP)  A little-known group that police say has ties to Kashmir's most feared militants claimed responsibility Sunday for a series of terrorist bombings that killed 59 people in New Delhi.

Authorities said they already had gathered useful clues about the near-simultaneous blasts Saturday night that ripped through a bus and two markets crowded ahead of the Hindu festival of Diwali, one of the year's busiest shopping seasons.

All around, broken glass and other wreckage littered the street (video), shop signs were ripped and twisted and clothes — mostly T-shirts and scarves — hung from low-strung power lines. CBS Radio News reports that Paharganj is a busy wholesale market, dotted with small, inexpensive hotels frequented by foreign travelers, particularly backpackers.

Investigators reportedly raided dozens of small hotels across India's capital looking for possible suspects, and police said "numerous" people were being questioned.

The attacks came at particularly sensitive time as India and Pakistan were hashing out an unprecedented agreement to partially open the heavily militarized frontier that divides the disputed territory of Kashmir to speed relief to victims of a massive earthquake earlier this month.

The agreement was finalized early Sunday, and Indian officials appeared hesitant to quickly put the blame for the bombings on Pakistan-based militants, unlike in previous terror attacks during a 16-year-old insurgency by Islamic separatists in India's part of Kashmir.

India's accusations of Pakistani involvement in a 2001 attack on parliament put the two nuclear-armed rivals on the brink of a fourth war. But they pulled back and, after pursuing peace efforts since early last year, both appeared intent on keeping the atmosphere calm.

"We have lots of information but it is not proper to disclose it yet," Indian Home Minister Shivraj Patil told clamoring journalists after an emergency meeting of the Cabinet called to discuss the attacks. "Our people are making good progress. The investigation is going well."

A man called a local news agency in Indian Kashmir to say the militant Islamic Inquilab Mahaz, or Front for Islamic Uprising, staged the bombings, which police said killed 59 people and wounded 210.

The caller, who identified himself as Ahmed Yaar Ghaznavi, said the bombings were "meant as a rebuff to the claims of Indian security groups" that militants had been wiped out by security crackdowns and the Oct. 8 earthquake that devastated the insurgents' heartland in the mountains of Kashmir.

A senior police officer in India's Jammu-Kashmir state said the caller's name was not familiar to intelligence agencies, and New Delhi's deputy police chief, Karnail Singh, said the group had not been very active since 1996.

However, while Singh refused to comment on the claim of responsibility, he said the group is linked to the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, the most feared of the dozens of Kashmiri militant groups.