Indian police arrest suspected bombing mastermind

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Indian police arrested 10 people on Saturday who they said were behind bomb attacks which killed at least 45 people in the western city of Ahmedabad last month.

Police said one of those arrested, Abu Bashir, was the mastermind of the bombings and that all the suspects were active members of the banned Students' Islamic Movement of India

(SIMI).

"As of information we have right now, he is the mastermind of the blasts (and) this network is the brains behind the blasts," senior police officer P. C. Pande told a news conference in Ahmedabad.

At least 16 bombs exploded in Ahmedabad on July 26, a day after another set of blasts in the southern Indian city of Bangalore killed a woman. Three days later, several unexploded bombs were found in the town of Surat, in Gujarat.

A little-known group called the "Indian Mujahideen" had claimed responsibility for the Ahmedabad attacks. But Pande said Indian Mujahideen was just "another identity" for SIMI.

SIMI, a Muslim group, has been blamed by Indian police for almost every major bomb attack in India, including explosions on commuter trains in Mumbai two years ago which killed 187 people.

Bashir, 30, was arrested in the northern city of Lucknow.

"We were on his lookout for the past several days ever since we were tipped off about his presence in Uttar Pradesh," Brij Lal, a senior state police official, told Reuters in Lucknow.

Ahmedabad is the main city in the communally sensitive and relatively wealthy western state of Gujarat, scene of deadly riots in 2002 in which 2,500 people are thought to have died, most of them Muslims killed by rampaging Hindu mobs.

(Additional reporting by Sharat Pradhan in Lucknow)

(Writing by Tony Tharakan; editing by Robin Pomeroy)

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