NEW DELHI—A powerful bomb hidden in a briefcase ripped through a crowd outside New Delhi’s High Court on Wednesday, killing 11 people and injuring 76, many of them petitioners waiting for legal hearings.
The device was placed near an entrance gate reception area, where more than 100 people were queuing for passes to the court complex, located in the heart of the Indian capital.
It was the first major attack on Indian soil since triple blasts in Mumbai on July 13 killed 26 people. It has still not been established who carried out those bombings.
“Eleven persons have died in this unfortunate incident and 76 others have been injured,” a Home Ministry statement said.
Gruesome mobile phone images of the moments after the attack were aired on television, showing screaming victims surrounded by bloody limbs and scattered files.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh conceded that there were “weaknesses in our security system and terrorists are taking advantage of them”.
“We have to overcome these,” Singh was quoted as saying by the Press Trust of India news agency aboard an plane taking him back to New Delhi from an official visit to Bangladesh.
Earlier Singh told reporters in Dhaka that the bombing was a “cowardly act of a terrorist nature.”
The United States, France, Britain and Pakistan, all condemned the bombing, with Washington describing it as “cowardly.”
Delhi police released sketches of two suspects from eyewitness accounts.
Investigators said they were also probing an e-mailed claim of responsibility purportedly sent from Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (HuJI), a Pakistan-based Islamist militant group linked to previous attacks on Indian soil.
“More than 100 people were in a queue at the reception,” Rahul Gupta, a petitioner whose case was listed for a hearing on Wednesday, told AFP at the scene, where the blast left a crater in the ground.
“There was a huge explosion. I saw a lot of people lying around in a pool of blood.”
The e-mail being studied by investigators warned that other courts would be targeted unless authorities repealed the death sentence on a man convicted for conspiring in a 2001 Islamist militant attack on India’s parliament.
“It would be very premature to make any comment on the mail at this stage, but yes that mail has to be looked at seriously because HuJI is a very prominent terrorist group,” S.C. Sinha, director general of India’s National Investigation Agency, told reporters.
HuJI militants have been active in Pakistan and India, while an affiliate group exists in Bangladesh.
One lawyer inside the court told AFP he was working in his office when the bomb detonated.
“I was in my chambers when I heard a huge explosion and the windows in my room were blown in,” M.I. Chowdhary said.
“People were carrying the injured away. Some of them looked horribly hurt.
“That time is peak hour for petitioners and other people getting their entry passes at the reception area. So it seems somebody had timed it to cause maximum casualties.”
“Security is really not up to the mark,” Chowdhary added. “It needs to be tightened around such a sensitive target.”
The last bombs in the Indian capital were in September 2008, when blasts in several upmarket shopping areas killed 22 people and injured nearly 100.
A home-grown militant outfit called the Indian Mujahideen claimed it was behind that attack.
India has made efforts to improve domestic security since the 2008 Mumbai attacks, in which 10 Islamist gunmen laid siege to the city, killing 166 people.
But experts say security forces still suffer from weak grassroots intelligence gathering.
New Delhi blamed Pakistan-based militants for the Mumbai attacks, sending relations between the nuclear-armed neighbours into a deep freeze.
A foreign office statement attributed to Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani condemned the latest attack, calling it a “heinous act.”
The High Court has been targeted before. In May, a low-intensity device was set off in the parking lot but there were no casualties and only minimal damage.
Other recent bombings include a blast in February last year at a packed restaurant in the western city of Pune, which killed 16 people including several foreigners.