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- <text id=93TT1273>
- <title>
- Mar. 29, 1993: India on Red Alert
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1993
- Mar. 29, 1993 Yeltsin's Last Stand
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- THE WEEK, Page 13
- WORLD
- India on Red Alert
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>Calcutta is shaken by blasts, but they are seemingly not linked
- to Bombay
- </p>
- <p> For a few tense days, it seemed as if the "Black Friday"
- bombings that had rocked Bombay on March 12 and killed 317 would
- proliferate. A U.S. intelligence report warned that New Delhi
- could be the next target. Then, just after midnight last
- Wednesday, a blast shook the center of Calcutta. Two
- 100-year-old tenement buildings collapsed into rubble. This time
- 86 people died. And again, on Friday, an explosion at a Calcutta
- train station killed four. Police, however, discounted a link
- with Bombay's synchronized explosions of 13 high-tech bombs,
- saying the first Calcutta tragedy was caused by the accidental
- detonation of a stockpile of explosives being hoarded for some
- future attack by a local gang running the city's "Satta" betting
- rackets.
- </p>
- <p> Indian leaders claim the Bombay explosions were
- masterminded by foreign forces, possibly Pakistan's Inter
- Services Intelligence. Piecing together a car bomb that exploded
- in the basement garage of the Air India skyscraper, Bombay
- police traced the ownership of vehicles used in the attacks to
- one of the city's main Muslim underworld families, the Memons.
- The six Memon brothers fled to Dubai shortly before the
- explosions, but police managed to arrest two hirelings who were
- allegedly paid $167 to plant some of the bombs.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
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