IANS/New Delhi


Friends console a man who lost his brother, outside a hospital in Mumbai
The Mumbai triple bombings yesterday, come a week after Home Minister P Chidambaram boasted of the first six months of 2011 being “most peaceful” in the last decade.
At a function July 6, the home minister said “with a sense of satisfaction” the 2011 had witnessed “the lowest level of violence in over a decade”.
The home minister told reporters at a different event on the same day that there has been no terror related incident in the country’s hinterland in the past six months and that violence in Jammu and Kashmir and northeastern regions had also dropped considerably.
“As far as the first six months of this year are concerned, there has been no incident of terror and no casualty in the hinterland in Jammu and Kashmir,” he said.
He, however, had warned that there was no room for complacency as security and intelligence were “keeping a vigil”.
But the terror revisited India only a week later striking Mumbai, India’s financial and entertainment hub, that has been a soft target of terrorists.
Police in Bangalore were put on high alert and thorough checking of vehicles and people at the airport, railway and bus stations began following the serial blasts in Mumbai yesterday.
An alert has also been sounded along the sensitive west coast, about 350 km here, and senior police officers have been directed to stay at their workplaces, Additional Director General of Police R K Datta told reporters.
“Additional force has been deployed at the airport and railway and bus stations,” said Bangalore Police Commissioner B G Jyothiprakash Mirji.
Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa condemned the Mumbai blasts and said he has called a meeting of senior civil and police officials in Bangalore today to review the security situation in the state.
Bangalore houses major IT firms, both Indian and multinational, large public sector industries, some of them defence related, and the space agency.
A home-grown Islamist terrorist group, the Indian Mujahideen (IM), is suspected to be behind the three moderate to high intensity explosions in Mumbai yesterday which Home Minister P Chidambaram said were “coordinated attack by terrorists”.
The terror attack comes days after two suspected Indian Mujahideen operatives, who provided vehicles used in the 2008 serial blasts in Gujarat that killed 56 people, were arrested from a Mumbai suburb by the Maharashtra Anti-Terror Squad (ATS).
The bombings at crowded places in Mumbai, which has turned out to be a soft target for terrorists, bear a “signature” of what the IM had used in carrying out earlier blasts in Bangalore, Ahmedabad and New Delhi in 2008, Varanasi and Pune in 2010, intelligence sources said.
However, they said it was just a “preliminary observation” as a detailed inquiry by a joint team of premier terror probe agency National Investigation Agency (NIA) and the ATS would reveal who was behind the blasts.
The sources said that the arrested IM suspects - 32-year-old Mohammed Mobin and his cousin 28-year-old Ayub Raja arrested with arms and ammunition on July 6 - were being questioned afresh if they could give some information on the blasts.