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India urges for calm, army called out

Blasts toll climbs to 45, little-known group claims responsibility, raid in Mumbai to net suspects

AFP, Ahmedabad
Indian leaders issued appeals for calm yesterday as the army was called out after a wave of bombings killed 45 people in Ahmedabad, a city rocked by deadly Hindu-Muslim riots six years ago.
The string of 16 bombings, which left more than 160 people injured, ripped through crowded places in the tinderbox western city — markets, buses and then hospitals struggling to treat the scores of victims.
Indian television channels said a little-known Islamist group calling itself the "Indian Mujahedeen" had claimed responsibility for the attacks, which came a day after a similar wave of bombings in the southern high-tech hub Bangalore.
Bomb squads defused at least three unexploded devices in Ahmedabad on Sunday, Indian news channels reported, while soldiers staged a 'flag march' -- or show of authority -- in sensitive pans of the city.
Police said a number of people had been detained in overnight raids, according to the Press Trust
of India news agency. Ahmedabad was calm Sunday, with police, soldiers and paramilitary forces fanning out across the city.
On the outskirts of India's financial hub Mumbai, police raided a house from which the email claiming responsibility for the attacks mayhave been sent.
Police have raided a Mumbai house as part of a probe into a series of bomb attacks in the western city of Ahmedabad, reports said Sunday.
The police seized a computer they say was die source of an email claiming responsibility for Saturday's attacks on behalf of a little-known Islamist group calling itself the "Indian Mujahedeen," the reports said.
A similar email was sent to news channels by the same group after a series of blasts in May in the western Indian city of Jaipur that killed more than 60 people.
The NDTV news channel said the property raided was rented to a US national. No arrests or detentions were made but authorities confiscated the computer's hard drive, the Times Now channel
reported.
Indian President Pratibha Patil expressed her "grief and sorrow" and also "appealed to the people of Ahmedabad to maintain peace and harmony."
Many of the victims had been peppered with red-hot nuts, bolts and ball bearings packed into bombs that were clearly designed to cause maximum casualties, doctors said.
At Ahmedabad's Civil Hospital, one of two medical facilities that were hit, victims could be seen writhing in corridors after the attack, their bodies punctured by flying pellets, and crying for treatment from overstretched and panicked staff.
"I had come here with other injured people who needed help. I was getting out of the ambulance when I saw a blue light and then I fell down," said one of the wounded, 52-year-old Laxman Dev.
"When I looked around, many people had died. I got saved because I fell."
The hospital was hit by a car
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bomb, and was still littered with broken glass and charred debris and smeared with blood hours after the blast, an AFP correspondent witnessed.
An army commander, who asked not to be named, said that "anger could spread once (he bodies are handed back (o relatives for cremations, so the presence of the army will act as a major psychological deterrent to riots.”
"The army has been called in as a precautionary measure and its personnel are conducting flag marches." additional police
i rrMohnn. J h a. :4o I d
reporters.
/Ml the bombs were detonated with timer devices and all went off in the space of 36 minutes, officials said. PTI put the latest toll at 45 dead and 162 injured.
"We should not allow’ anybody to make use of this blast to create more terror and to create more difficulties for the people.” said India's Home Minister Shivraj Patil, also ureing calm in Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat state.
The state's right-wing Hindu leader Narendra Modi, however, warned he would not spare the culprits.
"The land of Mahatma Gandhi has been bloodied by terrorists whom we shall not spare,” said Modi, the firebrand chief minister of the state where India's independence hero was born.
"Terrorists are waging a war against India. We should be prepared for a long battle against terrorism."