Bomber's deadly work on show beside Indian rail track

DEEWANA, India (Reuters) - By the side of a railway track just outside the Indian capital, a gray suitcase lies split open, revealing a bomber's deadly work.

More than a dozen plastic bottles are packed inside, carrying a highly inflammable cocktail of fuel oils and chemicals, mixed with pieces of cloth to prolong the fire.

Covering them, a foam pad embedded with a small electronic circuit board in a transparent plastic box. Coloured wires, now snipped, connect to a metal timer the size of a pencil and a thin, black torch-like detonator.

Alongside, a plastic bag with a yellowish powder -- thought to be sulphur -- is packed in cotton wool.

Two bombs like this detonated around midnight on Sunday on a train bound from India to Pakistan, sparking fires that killed at least 66 people, most of them Pakistanis.

This was one of two bombs that was found later on other carriages and defused.

Who planted the deadly bombs, no one yet knows. But they clearly knew what they were doing.

"These were made by experts," a police officer told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to the media.

"There was a light blinking on the outside of the suitcases probably to indicate that the timer had been set," he said, as trains crawled by on the track alongside.

Hours after the carnage, explosive experts from India's elite National Security Guard sat beside the tracks, surrounded by lush green wheat fields, examining the defused bomb.

"This seems like the act of local groups who used local materials and locally available technology," a senior forensic scientist told Reuters.

Less than a mile away, skeletons of the ill-fated coaches stand on a side track near the Deewana railway station, their blue paint peeled off by the heat to reveal a collage of black, gray and rust.

Window railings, seats and luggage racks have become a mass of burned metal. The floor is strewn with someone's half-burned red shawl, remnants of bags, water bottles and kettles.

A hint of burned flesh lingers in the air.

Investigators search the coaches for clues, stamping out cinders and raising wisps of smoke as they go. Every time a train passes on the parallel track, ash and pieces of broken, burned paint from the coaches are thrown into the air.

The attacks came almost exactly five years after a fire on a train that killed 59 Hindu pilgrims in Godhra in the western state of Gujarat, sparking communal riots in which around 2,500 people died, most of them Muslims.

It remains to be seen whether these latest bombs were planted by hardline Hindus intent on a belated revenge for Godhra, or by Muslim extremists trying to sabotage the peace process between India and Pakistan.

Whoever did it, their deadly intent is as clear as day.

"Many, many more would have died if the other two (bombs) had also gone off," said A.S. Ahlawat, a police officer in Deewana town, about 80 km (50 miles) north of the Indian capital.

"It was obviously planned to cause maximum damage."