Eight die in India’s first big attack since Mumbai

In India’s first terrorist attack since terrorists besieged Mumbai in 2008, a bomb on Saturday evening ripped through a restaurant in Pune, near India’s financial capital, killing at least eight people, reportedly including foreigners, and wounding 33 others.

Indian television reports said between one and four foreigners were among the dead in the blast, which rocked the German Bakery, a cafe popular with tourists staying at the nearby Osho ashram, one of India’s most famous communes, which hosts followers of the teachings of the late Osho Rajneesh, a spiritual guru.
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The explosion comes only a day after India and Pakistan agreed to resume high-level peace talks on February 25, which have been suspended since the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

“I was sitting in my living room when a strong blast shattered my windows,” said Niharika Arora, who lives across from the German Bakery, where the bomb was planted. “It is clearly an attack as the bakery is in a strategic spot close to Osho ashram.”

The bakery is also close to Pune’s Chabad House Jewish prayer and community centre.

Osho was one of the potential targets allegedly surveyed by David Coleman Headley, an American accused by US authorities of scouting targets for the Pakistan-based Islamic militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, ahead of the Mumbai attacks in 2008.

“Pune was one of the places reportedly visited by him for allegedly collecting target information for the LeT,” said B. Raman, director, Institute of Topical Studies, in Chennai.

Mr Headley has been detained in the US on accusations of helping to plot the Mumbai attacks, in which a group of 10 terrorists killed 166 people in a commando-style assault on three luxury hotels, a tourist cafe – Leopold’s, a railway station and another Jewish centre.

“It’s the Leopold’s of Pune,” said Charu Shree Roy, a film student at the nearby Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, referring to the German Bakery. “A lot of Osho people go there.”

No one has claimed responsibility for the Pune attack, police said.

“There was an abandoned bag which seems to have contained some IED [improvised explosive device],” senior police official Rajendra Sonawane told reporters.

The explosion at German Bakery occurred in the evening, when the restaurant was packed with tourists and foreigners. ”Four women foreigners were killed. Their nationality is not known.” Dilip Band, a senior police official, told India’s CNN-IBN television.

Debris was strewn around the bakery. The impact of the blast knocked the bakery’s sign off, blew out windows and left a large crater inside the restaurant.

”It [the bomb] was under one of the tables ... We transferred lots of people to the ambulances ... there is no German bakery any more,” one foreigner, short of breath and resting against a wall, told local CNN-IBN television.