CALCUTTA: Maoist rebels detonated land mines and set a security outpost ablaze in eastern India, killing at least 24 policemen in the worst-ever attack on police in the restive area.

An additional seven officers were wounded in the brazen assault Monday by more than 100 communist fighters, who also stole weapons from the security post in Shilda village of West Bengal state, said district magistrate N.S. Nigam.

''Never before the police here have suffered so many losses in one attack,'' Surajit Kar Purkayastha, a police inspector-general, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Shilda is about 105 miles (170 kilometers) southwest of state capital, Calcutta. A total of 51 police officers were in the camp at the time of the attack, the Press Trust of India news agency said.

Nigam said the camp was close to a bustling market, and the rebels struck when a large number of people were shopping in the area.

Kishenji, a top Maoist leader in the area, claimed responsibility for the attack in a call to a local television station. He said it was in retaliation for a recent security crackdown against the rebels.

Police reinforcements scoured the area Tuesday for the assailants who fled after the assault, Nigam said.—AP

Three suspected Mumbai lawyer killers arrested

Tuesday, 16 Feb, 2010

MUMBAI: Three men accused of killing the lawyer for a suspect in the 2008 Mumbai attack have been arrested, but their motive appears to be unrelated to the ongoing terror trial, police said on Tuesday.

Joint police commissioner Rakesh Maria said the men arrested late Monday were affiliated with an Indian gang. They are accused of murdering attorney Shahid Azmi on Feb. 11.

Maria said Azmi’s death apparently had nothing to do with his representation of Fahim Ansari, who is accused of providing maps that helped 10 Pakistan-based gunmen carry out the November 2008 attack on Mumbai that left 166 dead.

Maria added that the motive is still under investigation.

The suspects – Devendar Jagtap, Pintoo Devram Bhagal and Vinod Vichare – are all Indian citizens working with underworld leader Chotta Rajan, an Indian now living in Malaysia, Maria said.

One suspect remains at large, he said.

Pune Blast

Feb 17, 2010

Sahni added that the state of Indian internal security is "deplorable" . He said that while the blast in Pune had some of the tell-tale signs of a terror attack - targeting foreigners as well as Indians - that it was different. For one, he said, it was directed solely at a soft target, and it did not have a suicide element - a bomb was left in a backpack. 

The bakery is located near the ashram of an international spiritual organization, the Osho Ashram, which is visited mostly by foreigners. It is also very near Chabad House - a center for disseminating orthodox Jewish religious beliefs. In this way, the attack met the criteria of hitting foreigners, including Jews, and Indians. 

"The operation was conducted by persons with basic knowledge of explosives which indicated that the terrorists who planted the bomb may not have had any special expertise or training. But the attack was cleverly targeted and implemented, " said B Raman, an ex-Indian intelligence official and presently the director of the Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai. 

The attack was timed to derail a planned resumption of India-Pakistan peace talks, said K Subrahmanyam, a noted securityexpert. "Jihadis and extremists in the region do not want India and Pakistan to conduct any kind of reconciliatory talks and thus carried out the attack at an opportune time in an effort to jeopardize that move," he said. 

Despite initial doubts, India has decided to go ahead with talks between the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan. 

According to Subrahmanyam, the blast was also triggered by an ongoing offensive against the Taliban in Marjah in Helmand province in Afghanistan by coalition forces. 

"As soon as the Americans started the attack on Marjah, Taliban sympathizers in Pakistan needed a strategy that could facilitate an easy entry of the Afghan Taliban coming from Afghanistan to Pakistan," he said. "By attacking India, these sympathizers are hoping to increase tensions between the two countries, which will force Pakistan to move forces away from the Af-Pak border to the Indo-Pak border, thereby making the Af-Pak border a little more porous for the fleeing Afghan Taliban," said Subrahmanyam. 

M D Nalapat, director of the Department of Geopolitics at Manipal University, believes that the Pune attack was carried out by Indian nationals trained by Pakistan-based jihadis and that its mastermind is inside India. 

"Ever since the Mumbai attacks, India has been preparing for another seaborne attack; or a fresh attack that could land from abroad. The country has not been paying equal attention to threats emerging from homegrown terror cells," said Nalapat. 

India has a sizeable number of extremists within the country who are active in planning and executing terrorist attacks. Nalapat reckons that despite large numbers of arrests in recent years close to 200 domestic extremists are still at large operating either as sleeper cells or in small groups planning other attacks. 

Some Indian investigators suspect the Pune attack was the handiwork of a local extremist group called the Indian Mujahideen, as part of the so-called "Karachi Project". This involves fugitive Indian jihadis and sources from the Pakistani army who are trying to keep an offensive against India alive. 

"The objective of the attack was also to create a deniability that attackers did not originate from Pakistani soil," said Nalapat. "We must accept that we are now facing an entirely different tactic of an attack planned and carried out by a homegrown terror outfit, and that has to be ruthlessly nipped in the bud." 

Indrajit Basu is a correspondent for Asia Times Online based in Kolkata.