Officials believe latest bomb attack in India was meant for Jewish center

15 February 2010

A bomb that exploded in the German Bakery, a crowded café in the Indian city of Pune, on Saturday might have been meant to be detonated at the nearby Chabad house, Indian authorities have said. Nine people were killed in the blast and 57 wounded. The German Bakery is ony a few meters away from the city's Chabad house.

Pune is located 125 miles southeast of Mumbai, where in November 2008 in several simultaneous terrorist attacks, including at the local Chabad house, 179 people were killed, among them six Jews. Indian Home Affairs Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said that the Chabad house in Pune had been under surveillance by David Headley, an American of Pakistani descent arrested last year in Chicago for allegedly scouting out targets for the Mumbai attack.

The bomb that was detonated on Saturday in Pune had been left in a shopping bag by terrorists pretending to be customers, according to media reports. Police believe that another terrorist was meant to pick up the bag and take it to the nearby Chabad house, the newspaper ‘Haaretz’ reports. The bag exploded when a waiter opened it.  

The blast came a day after India and Pakistan agreed to meet for talks in Delhi, their first formal negotiations since 2008. India blames Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based militant group, for the Mumbai terrorist attacks. However, no conclusions could be drawn yet as to who was responsible for Saturday's attack in Pune, an Indian government minister was quoted as saying, and nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the bombing.

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