Indian police foil bomb attack on Delhi

Indian police have foiled a major bomb attack on the capital, Delhi, by suspected Pakistan-based militants, Home Minister P. Chidambaram said Wednesday.

Chidambaram told reporters that two men allegedly linked to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) group in Pakistan had been arrested at the city’s main train station carrying explosives, according to the Agence France Presse.

Let, whose name means “The Army of the Pure” in Urdu, is one of the most powerful militant groups in Pakistan, and is blamed for carrying out the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks in which 166 people were killed.

“A LeT-sponsored module [cell] has been busted in Delhi in an operation jointly carried out by national agencies and a couple of state police forces,” Chidambaram said, adding: “They were planning to detonate a bomb or more than one bomb in a crowded locality.”

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The Times of India reported that the target of the bombing plot was the busy Chandni Chowk market, where an explosion would have set the hundreds of yards of cloth on sale alight and maximized the damage.

The minister said that additional suspects have also been arrested in other states in connection with the plot, the BBC reported, saying: “This was an important module that planned terrorist incidents in Delhi.”

Delhi has been the scene of several terrorist attacks in recent years. In September members of another Pakistan-based militant group, Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami, detonated explosives hidden in a briefcase outside the capital’s High Court, killing 12 and injuring more than 70.

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