GUWAHATI, Aug 26: Five people were killed and scores wounded in northeastern India on Thursday when militants blew up two buses and threw a grenade into a market, officials said.
The attacks in Assam state, and two others on Wednesday, were blamed on the banned United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) which is fighting for an independent homeland.
Two people were killed and 33 wounded, some critically, when explosives concealed in a sack blew apart a crowded bus in the town of Gossaigaon, 270 kilometres (167 miles) west of Assam's main city of Guwahati, officials said.
"Passengers spotted an unidentified sack inside the bus and as they were trying to disembark, the explosion took place, blowing apart the vehicle," Kokrajhar district magistrate Asish Bhutani said.
An hour later a bus belonging to the paramilitary Border Security Force (BSF) and carrying soldiers and their families hit a landmine in the town of Paikan, 140 kilometres west of Guwahati.
Two soldiers and a six-year-old girl, the daughter of a trooper going on holiday, were killed, police Inspector General Khagen Sharma said. Nine people were wounded. Later on Thursday a suspected ULFA militant on a motorbike threw a grenade into a busy market in Tangla, 60 kilometres north of Guwahati, police chief Khagen Sharma said.
"At least seven shoppers were critically wounded," said Sharma. The militant escaped. Sharma said the ULFA militants had planned the attacks and others in a desperate attempt to stay in the news. "The ULFA has rocked Assam with three blasts and two grenade attacks in the last 24 hours to grab headlines," he said.
"We have intercepted messages from ULFA militants regarding their plans to unleash terror in the state," he said. On Wednesday suspected ULFA rebels threw a grenade outside a cinema in the eastern Assamese town of Dibrugarh, killing one person and wounding a dozen more, including two policemen.
They are also blamed for a blast on a railway track in western Assam's Kokhrajhar district on Wednesday which narrowly missed a goods train that had passed minutes before.
In the most deadly recent attack by suspected ULFA militants, 15 people were killed on August 15 by a landmine in Assam's eastern Dhemaji district. Many of the dead were students taking part in a parade to celebrate India's Independence Day. -AFP