The seven bombs killed 80 people including 10 children and injured another 200 when they went off over a 20-minute period in the city’s crowded bazaars on Tuesday evening. An eighth device failed to detonate.
“We have arrested two people and have detained several more for questioning,” said Vasundhara Raje, the chief minister of Rajasthan state of which Jaipur is the capital.
Mrs Raje, who belongs to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, made a thinly veiled jibe at India’s neighbouring nuclear rival Pakistan. “This seems to have been done by some international group,” she claimed.
Pakistan-based Islamic militants, fighting Indian rule in the disputed Jammu and Kashmir province, are blamed routinely for such attacks. The bombings on Tuesday were Jaipur’s first in an India wracked by terrorist attacks.
The state police chief, Amarjeet S Gill, said that nine teams of terrorists were deployed to carry out the bombings.
Mrs Raje also said that the bombs used in the attack were a mix of plastic RDX explosive, ammonium nitrate and ball-bearings that acted like tiny missiles once the devices were detonated.
Officials and witnesses said these ball bearings, which were yesterday still embedded in walls and doors in areas where the blasts took place, were largely responsible for the fatalities.
Officials said the bombs were all tied to newly purchased bicycles and scattered in a 500 yard arc around the busy market place that is the hub of Jaipur’s emerald and gold market and the city’s principal commercial centre. They were detonated within a 20-minute period beginning at 7.20pm.
Investigations had revealed that all the bicycles had been bought locally in Jaipur.
"They (the bombs) were ensured to inflict the maximum damage at a time when the market was packed,” said R S Malik, a banker who witnessed one of the explosions near a Hindu temple. It was meticulously planned and diabolically executed, he added.
"Jaipur’s fate is now sealed as it has become the terrorists’ target,” said Sanjay Bhatia, who was speaking from his bed in a local hospital, where he was carried after first being given up for dead. Its future is bleak, he lamented.
Nearby lay four-year old Sameena Khan who had lost her mother and two aunts in the blasts as they had accompanied her shopping.
“There is no one left for me in this world,” she whispered.
Police, meanwhile, imposed a daylong curfew in Jaipur to prevent any retaliatory violence between the city’s majority Hindu community and Muslims who comprise around a fifth of Jaipur’s population.
"The curfew is a precaution to ensure peace,” said Mrs Raje.
The authorities suspect Islamic militants were behind the blasts, and though no one has claimed responsibility for them, like most bombings in India, a “foreign country” determined to wreck India’s growing prosperity has been blamed by the government.
The allegation, which refers to Pakistan, came as India claimed to have been the victim of “unprovoked” gunfire by the Pakistani army across the disputed Kashmir border in violation of a four-year old ceasefire.
The Indian authorities, however, remain circumspect about blaming Pakistan explicitly as the Jaipur bombings come a week before the foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee travels to Islamabad to attempt to revive the stalled bilateral peace process.
President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and his prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, however, have condemned the Jaipur blasts as have many other senior politicians in Islamabad.
But India believes that many Islamic militant groups attempting to infiltrate its territory in northern Jammu and Kashmir state from across the disputed border in recent days were backed by Pakistan.
Meanwhile, funeral processions marched through Jaipur all day as the dead were cremated.
“We never even dreamt that such a thing could happen to our family and city,” said M K Sharma of his Brahmin brother who died while leading the prayers in a temple that was targeted. “It’s worse than karma”, he added.
