Sophisticated attacks catch Indian agencies napping

By Simon Denyer - Analysis

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The sophistication of a wave of bomb attacks in India has caught the country's police and intelligence networks napping, and suggests militants may have received training abroad.

But the sheer scale of the attacks in Bangalore and Ahmedabad shows that significant numbers of local Muslims have been recruited into militant groups, and marks the "Indianisation of the jihad", security and intelligence experts said.

At least 46 people were killed in a succession of bomb blasts since Friday, most of them in the communally sensitive city of Ahmedabad in the western state of Gujarat, apparently in revenge for the 2002 communal riots there.

"There was a high level of sophistication in the way these attacks were planned and orchestrated," said B. Raman, a former head of India's external spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). "The people who did it have a lot of expertise."

Reports suggest the internet address of an American living in Mumbai was hacked to send an email just five minutes before the first bombs exploded in Ahmedabad, warning of death "in the name of Allah" and on behalf of a group called the Indian Mujahideen.

An earlier email sent by the group before May's attacks in Jaipur had been traced to a cybercafe, a method also used to track down Daniel Pearl's kidnappers in Pakistan in 2002. This time the sender of the email may prove harder to trace.

Integrated circuits were used to detonate the Bangalore bombs, technology which requires expertise and training.

The bombers also stayed one step ahead of the police by not using mobile phones to detonate Saturday's blasts, as they had in the past. That allowed the bombers to detonate a second set of bombs without having to worry about the mobile phone network being closed down, as police in Bangalore did on Friday.