Explosion Kills 9 in Pune; India Says Terror Attack

Feb. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Nine people were killed when a bomb ripped through a bakery popular with international visitors in the Indian city of Pune, in what officials called the biggest terrorist strike in the nation since the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

“Six bodies have been identified,” police official R. Shalake said in a telephone interview from Pune, situated approximately 100 kilometers (62 miles) southeast of India’s financial hub of Mumbai. “There are three unknown bodies. At least 53 people have been injured,” Shalake said.

Television channels showed tables and chairs strewn across the pavement outside the bakery, with billboards ripped from their mountings. The blast occurred at 7:30 p.m. local time yesterday, Home Secretary Gopal K. Pillai said at a New Delhi news conference.

Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said it was “the biggest terror incident in 14 months,” in remarks carried by Indian television channels late yesterday. “All the information available now points to a plot to explode a device at a place frequented by foreigners and locals,” he said.

Both he and Pillai said forensic investigations must be completed before it will be possible to say who was behind the bombing. “I don’t think any particular community was targeted. There is no failure of intelligence and it was an insidious attack. This is not an overt terror attack,” Chidambaram said.

Major Bombing

“The explosion sounded like a Katyusha” rocket, said Betzalel Kupchik, a rabbi at the Chabad House, a Jewish center, across the street from the bakery. The place was “probably targeted because you have a lot of foreigners coming there,” Kupchik said.

The Pune attack is the first major bombing in India since the November 2008 assault on Mumbai that killed 166 people. India blamed the Mumbai attack on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e- Taiba group and scrapped five years of peace talks with its neighbor. The latest incident may threaten plans to revive negotiations between the two nuclear-armed countries. Foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan are scheduled to meet Feb. 25.

A spiritual center, located near the bakery and also frequented by foreigners, was among five places surveyed by David Coleman Headley, a Chicago man indicted by the U.S. for scouting targets before the Mumbai attacks, Pillai told reporters. Headley has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Patrols, Training

After the Mumbai attack, Chidambaram created a federal investigation agency, strengthened patrols of coastal areas and improved training for anti-terrorism police as part of a national security overhaul.

Pillai said Dec. 9 that India remains vulnerable to terror attacks even after the revamp. Ports, power plants, nuclear installations, oil refineries and information technology firms are particularly vulnerable as groups based in India and abroad try to “wreck India’s economy,” he said.

Rebel groups in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir have been fighting for independence from India or a union with Pakistan since 1989. The country also faces insurgencies in some northeastern states, while Maoist guerillas have attacked economic infrastructure and security forces in southern and eastern parts of the country.