Word: attacks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Terrorist attacks have become distressingly familiar in India. Since 2005, more than 520 people have been killed, and hundreds more injured, in 12 major bombings around the country. Claims of responsibility are rare, and Indian defense and intelligence analysts have long assumed that large-scale, coordinated bombings like the Ahmedabad attack are the handiwork of international, or Pakistani, terror networks. But experts are now coming to accept that the volume of recent attacks would not have been possible without a significant number of local recruits. "They are increasingly acquiring their own expertise," says B. Raman, former head of counterterrorism...
...That was the disquieting reality India awoke to on July 27, after a coordinated series of bomb blasts rocked Ahmedabad, an elegant, ancient city in the western state of Gujarat. Coming just a day after eight blasts hit Bangalore, the center of India's thriving technology industry, the attack seemed, as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said during a visit to Ahmedabad, to target India's cosmopolitan, secular social fabric. The whole country seemed to sense the threat, as India's major cities immediately set up checkpoints and metal detectors. At least 17 more unexploded bombs were defused on July...
...denied involvement. And the group doesn't usually target civilians, some analysts point out, noting that the working-class neighborhood of Gungoren is populated by Kurds as well as Turks. "It could be a retaliatory attack by the PKK," says Deniz Ulke Aribogan, an international relations professor at Bahcesehir University. "But this doesn't really fit into the PKK's general strategy. PKK attacks are usually in rural areas and target security forces, rather than directed at a broad public in the city...
...when Sunday's attack came a day before a top court convened to decide whether to ban the governing party for anti-secularism, and just two days after another court decided to take up the case against the Ergenekon defendants, the timing struck many as significant. "Call me paranoid," says Cuneyt Ulsever, columnist for the mainstream daily Hurriyet. "I think the bomb was Ergenekon at work. It was telling us that they are still here." That seemed to be the angle the PKK itself was taking when it blamed Sunday's attack on "dark forces...
...There is yet a third option being discussed, one that merges the two: that the attack was carried out by renegade PKK militants functioning as terrorists-for-hire - perhaps for operators like those fingered in the Ergenekon indictment. "My impression is that this attack was carried out by subcontractors," Sedat Laciner, director of Turkey's International Strategic Research Organization, told the NTV news channel. "It looks like it was planned by a group who infiltrated the PKK. As an organization, the PKK is weakened. It has become open to this kind of infiltration...