Six bombs leave up to 60 people dead in India

Up to 60 people have been killed in a series of bomb attacks in India's western city of Jaipur, officials and witnesses said.

At least six bombs exploded in markets and near a Hindu temple in Jaipur's crowded walled city, which also left up to 150 people wounded. Rajasthan state government officials said between 50 and 60 people were killed in the explosions, the deadliest bomb attacks in India in nearly two years.

"According to the information I have received, 60 people have died and 150 have been injured," the state's Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje was quoted as saying by the Press Trust of India. But the state's police chief,Amorjot Singh Gill, said 45 people had been killed and 100 injured.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but India has previously blamed Pakistan-based Islamist militants fighting to end New Delhi's rule of Kashmir for such bombings.

In July 2006, seven explosions ripped through Mumbai's railway system, killing more than 180 people. That attack, like many others, was blamed on Islamic militants based in neighbouring Pakistan and aided by local Muslims.

The Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh condemned the bombings and appealed for calm.

A witness, Hemanth Modi, told the NDTV news channel: "I heard a deafening noise and I thought it was a [gas] cylinder blast."

Television stations showed wrecked bicycles and pools of blood, with sirens blaring in the background. "People started running around and I followed them," another witness, Anil Garg, told NDTV. "There are huge traffic jams. I am very scared."

One blast was near a Hindu temple, where large crowds gather every Tuesday in honour of the monkey god Hanuman.

The latest attack comes just over a week before India's Foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee is due to visit Islamabad to review the four-year-old peace process, his first visit since a new, civilian government took over in Pakistan. It also comes just a few days after fresh firing along the border between the neighbours in Kashmir, with India saying Islamist militants had been trying to sneak in.

"There could be a conspiracy behind this," Sriprakash Jaiswal, India's junior home affairs minister, was quoted as saying by television stations. But he did not blame any one group or country.

Alerts were also issued in New Delhi and the country's financial capital Mumbai. "We'll be on high alert," said sub-inspector Shivaji Vishnu Patil in the Mumbai police control room. Although police are not aware of any specific threat in Mumbai, he said extra armed police would be sent to guard power stations, prominent mosques and Hindu temples as a normal precaution.

In the past few years, a string of bomb blasts in Indian cities have killed hundreds of people. Last August, three bombs killed 38 people in Hyderabad, in southern India. In October last year, a bomb exploded at a Muslim shrine in Ajmer, Rajasthan, killing at least two people. In November, explosions in three northern cities – Varanasi, Lucknow and Faizabad – killed at least 13 people.

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