WE are deeply distressed at the explosions which have once again claimed innocent lives in India and Pakistan. We find hardly any words strong enough to condemn these mindless acts, barbarity which reduces lives to chaos and disfigures the fabric of society. On Wednesday, even as Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh was on a visit to Bangladesh, a bomb explosion outside the High Court in New Delhi left 11 people dead and as many as 76 injured. The figures could go higher, as they usually do in such circumstances. On the same day, suicide attacks by the Taliban in Quetta left 24 people dead and no fewer than 86 others receiving injuries. In the case of the attack in Delhi, the notorious Huji outfit has reportedly claimed responsibility by e-mail. The explosions in Quetta were obviously a retaliatory step by the Taliban over the recent arrest of one of its operatives by the Frontier Corps paramilitary force and indeed occurred at the residence of the deputy chief of the force.

The irony here is that just as the world prepares to remember the victims of the September 2001 attacks on New York's twin towers, these forces of destruction have struck in both India and Pakistan. The explosions only show that terrorism is yet to be fully neutralized and that nations in the South Asian region need to beef up their security through more focused coordination, particularly through intelligence gathering and follow-up action against militants of all definitions. In Bangladesh, we may rest easy in the thought that organizations such as Huji have been weakened by concerted action by the state in recent years. Even so, the blasts in Delhi and Quetta show amply the continued ability of terrorist outfits to launch attacks at unlikely places and, worst, on innocent men and women. That terrorist elements are yet free to wreck lives is a truth which must never be lost sigh of.

As the Indian prime minister noted in Dhaka on Wednesday, both his country and Bangladesh remain vulnerable to the forces of extremism and terrorism. He has only echoed the sentiments of the people of the region. The response to such elements must be without ambiguity: there must not be any laxity in flushing them out.