GUWAHATI, Aug 7: A string of blasts and attacks by rebels in Assam on Sunday left three people dead and at least nine injured as violence escalated ahead of the country’s Independence Day celebrations on August 15, police said. A powerful explosion rocked a crowded market at 7:15 pm (1345 GMT) near Boko village, about 40 kilometres from Assam’s main city of Guwahati, a police official said.

“Twelve people were injured in the attack of which three, including a woman, died in hospital. Two others are in a serious condition. The explosion took place when the market was teeming with people,” the official told AFP, requesting anonymity. Police believe the bombing was carried out by the outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), the most dominant of more than two dozen rebel groups active in the region and fighting battles of secession for decades.

In a separate incident, a pipeline of state-owned Oil India Limited (OIL) was blown up early on Sunday by ULFA militants in Assam’s Sivasagar district, a police official said. The 1,150-kilometre pipeline supplies crude to a refinery at Barauni in the eastern state of Bihar. Oil supplies were suspended because of the attack, a company official said.

At least six huts were burnt in the fire that raged after the blast, which also caused an oil spill. Later in the evening, around 7:00 pm (1330 GMT), another oil pipeline was blown up near OIL headquarters at Duliajan, 550 kilometres east of Guwahati. No casualties were reported from the incident, police said.

Militants also lobbed a grenade at a paramalitary patrol party in the western district of Chirang, 230 kilometres from Guwahati, but the grenade missed its target and caused no damage.

Railway officials detected a powerful bomb on the tracks minutes after the Brahmaputra Mail — a long distance train from Assam to New Delhi — left Lanka station, 150 kilometres from Guwahati.

Incoming and outgoing trains were stopped until the bomb was defused, police said.

“The attacks are a part of a campaign by the ULFA to create terror and panic across Assam ahead of Independence Day,” Assam inspector-general of police Khagen Sharma told AFP.

“We had reports that the ULFA would target vital installations and security forces beginning Saturday and they have done it.” More than two dozen rebel groups in the oil-rich northeast are fighting for secession and routinely boycott Independence Day celebrations, observing it as a “black day”.

India attained freedom from Britain on August 15, 1947. The northeast is a large and remote area comprising seven states of which Assam is the biggest. More than 10,000 people have lost their lives to insurgency in the past two decades. Rebels have traditionally conducted attacks in the run-up to Independence Day.—AFP