India: Police and Hindu supremacists engage in provocations following Varanasi bombings

The first bomb exploded around 6 p.m. in the crowded Sankat Mochan temple, setting off a stampede among evening worshippers, resulting in additional injuries. The Sankat Mochan temple, which is devoted to the Hindu monkey-god Hanuman, is Varanasi’s second most popular temple. The second bomb exploded a little later inside a waiting room at the nearby railway station. It caused 11 immediate deaths and left tens of people injured.

The Indian dailies The Hindu and The Telegraph reported an additional bomb blast (without reporting any casualties) inside the Delhi-bound Shiv-Ganga Express train, which was parked at the platform when the bomb exploded in the waiting room.

Under the approving headline, “Hours after the bomb attacks, police hit back,” The Hindu reported that the police seized on the charged political atmosphere created by the slaughter of civilians in the blasts to carry out the extra-judicial killing of three suspected members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamic fundamentalist group that is based in, and opposed to Indian government control of, Kashmir.

A joint force of Jammu and Kashmir and UP police cornered, then executed a 42-year-old “suspected senior Lashkar organiser,” Mohammad Salim bin-Aziz, in the UP capital Lucknow. Meanwhile, the Delhi police anti-terrorist squad killed two “terrorists” one of whom, Ghulam Yazdani, was supposedly the organiser of the Dhaka-based cell of Lashkar. However, the same report also quoted a senior official as saying, “there is no evidence to suggest either group had any direct contact with the Varanasi bombers”.

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/vara-m11.shtml