Bomb Kills at Least 16 in New Delhi

NEW DELHI —  Car bombers struck savagely in the heart of middle-class New Delhi at sunset Tuesday, setting off a devastating blast at a busy shopping area that killed at least 16 people and wounded 45 others, police said.

The powerful explosion, which touched off fires that gutted a four-story building and more than 10 market stalls, came two days before parliamentary elections are to be held in Muslim-majority areas of the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. A Kashmiri separatist group claimed responsibility.

In the four-story building, lessons were underway at a dance school when the bomb rocked the edifice, residents said. The building, Pushpa Market, was quickly ablaze from top to bottom, but many inside managed to escape.

At least four of the people killed were storekeepers, Deputy Police Commissioner Dharmendra Kumar said. A security guard said he saw three children, two young ragpickers and a 12-year-old boy from a middle-class family, carried away, perhaps dead.

Forty-five people were injured, many by flying glass or debris, Kumar said.

A preliminary report by police bomb experts Tuesday night said that at least 22 pounds of explosives had been used, set off by a timer or remote control.

The spectacle of such death and destruction close to home stunned many residents of the area, one of the Indian capital’s choice residential addresses.

“We have heard of explosions in Connaught Place [in the city center] before, but this is the first time there’s something here,” S.K. Sachdeva said.

The street was strewn with glass shards from shattered windows. Many bicycles and motor scooters were singed by the explosion, and the hubcaps of wrecked cars were scattered about.

After night fell, hundreds of people gathered in the harsh light of police floodlights as firefighters battled to bring the blazes under control.

The bombing was the first in India since the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was sworn in Thursday. In its campaign manifesto, Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party had called for revocation of the constitutional autonomy granted Kashmir.

“No effort will be spared to bring the culprits to book,” Vajpayee said in his home constituency of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh state, when told of the bombing. “We will not be cowed down by such incidents.”

The Press Trust of India news agency reported that a man claiming to speak for the Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Front said it and another group, Lashkar-e-Sajjad, were responsible.

The news agency quoted the man as saying the groups had taken “this serious step to thwart the government’s efforts to hold elections in the [Kashmir] valley.” Vajpayee has said the elections in Kashmir will proceed.

Police officers at the scene said the explosion appeared to have come from a small, Indian-made Maruti van that was mangled and incinerated in the blast along with five other automobiles parked in the same row. Parts of the suspect van were found 100 yards away.

On April 27, the first day of the Indian elections, a bomb killed 15 people on a bus outside New Delhi. Sikh separatists from the state of Punjab and Kashmiris claimed responsibility. They also claimed they had caused the collapse of a hotel in central New Delhi a week earlier in which 17 people died.