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India’s government said a car explosion that killed at least eight people in New Delhi was a terrorist incident “perpetrated by anti-national forces”, a conclusion that comes amid heightened regional tensions.
Speaking after a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Indian information minister Ashwini Vaishnaw gave no details of who authorities believe was behind Monday’s blast near the historic 17th-century Red Fort in a crowded area of the capital’s old quarter.
However, Indian security officials said they were examining a possible connection between the explosion and the seizure earlier on Monday of bomb-making material near Delhi, which police in the restive India-administered territory of Kashmir have linked to Pakistan-based militants.
Kashmir police had said on Tuesday that the investigation that led to the seizures had “revealed a white-collar terror ecosystem, involving radicalised professionals and students in contact with foreign handlers, operating from Pakistan and other countries”.
Pakistan on Tuesday accused India of pursuing “state terrorism” after a suicide car bombing killed at least 12 people outside a judicial complex in its capital Islamabad. India has strongly denied any involvement.
The nuclear-armed neighbours have long accused each other of supporting terrorists and separatist groups on their territories and fought a brief but fierce conflict in May after a massacre by militants in India-administered Kashmir.
Vaishnaw said the cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi had “expressed its profound grief over the loss of lives in the terrorist incident involving a car explosion near the Red Fort in Delhi”. The attack was “heinous”, he added.
Modi on Wednesday visited people injured in the car explosion, reiterating his vow that “those behind the conspiracy” would be brought to justice. Local police had originally said three of the dead people were in the car that exploded, but security officials confirmed on Wednesday that a lone driver was in the vehicle.
Indian authorities on Monday seized arms and bomb-making material in the state of Haryana near Delhi. They said the seizure of more than 2,900kg of material that could be used to make explosive devices came after an investigation that started with a routine probe into anti-India posters that appeared in the Kashmiri city of Srinagar last month.
Police in India-administered Kashmir linked the weapons cache to the “proscribed terrorist” organisation Jaish-e-Mohammad, or the Army of Mohammad, which since its inception in 1999 has carried out numerous high-profile attacks in India.
Security officials in New Delhi said people arrested in the investigation, some of them doctors, were linked to the Pakistan-based militants. Islamabad has denied backing Jaish-e-Mohammad.
Security officials said it was unclear whether the blast near the Red Fort was deliberately triggered or was the accidental detonation of explosives being transported elsewhere.
