NEW DELHI, March 8: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav, cornered by the opposition over a devastating bombing incident in the Hindu holy city of Varanasi, pointed the finger at Pakistan on Wednesday, saying that the attackers had been trained across the border.
Typically, Uttar Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir police claimed killing the mastermind of Tuesday’s attack and identified him as a terrorist active in Jammu and Kashmir. He was identified as Salaar alias Salem, an alleged member of the banned Lashkar-i-Taiba group.
The serial blasts at the Sankatmochan temple and the Cantonment railway station in the Hindu temple town of Varanasi killed at least 14 people and injured 40 others.
Indian news reports said three other alleged terrorists of the banned militant outfit Lashker-i-Taiba were gunned down by police in the capital and in the northern city of Lucknow on Wednesday. Police claimed to have seized a cache of arms and explosives from them.
The Delhi police said the shooting had taken place in the Bawana area of west Delhi in which one militant had been killed while the other arrested.
They said the three militants were on the most-wanted list for several cases of blasts and attacks on police teams in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh.
According to police, one of them, Ghulam Yazdani, was the mastermind behind bombings in these four states and the second terrorist was identified as Ahsan Ullah Hasan. They said that Yazdani was from Nalgonda district in Andhra Pradesh while Hasan was from Bangladesh.
Mr Yadav told a news conference in Varanasi that Tuesday’s blasts were “definitely an act of terrorism”. Referring to an encounter at Gosainganj near Lucknow on Wednesday, Mr Yadav said he had been told that the slain terrorist was a Pakistani.
Seizing on the Varanasi blasts, India’s main opposition BJP charged the Yadav government in Uttar Pradesh and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government at the Centre with pursuing minority appeasement policy and said this “emboldened” terrorists to carry out ghastly acts in the country.