Police probing bombings in western India that killed 61 people said on Friday that new evidence pointed increasingly towards Indian militants backed by a Bangladeshi militant group as being behind the blasts. Eight bombs, all strapped to bicycles, ripped through a crowded shopping area in the popular tourist city of Jaipur on Tuesday evening. Another 216 people were wounded. Investigators said the attack bore hallmarks of the Bangladeshi militant group Harkat-ul-Jihad Al-Islami (HuJI), suspected to be behind several previous blasts in India. “The modus operandi of the entire operation, the way the bombs were manufactured and concealed in bags are very similar to the way HuJI operates,” Pankaj Singh, a senior police officer in Rajasthan state where the attacks happened, told Reuters. “It is very possible that Indian groups helped them,” Singh said in Jaipur. Bangladeshi officials said India should not jump to conclusions. “While we don't rule out the existence of HuJI in Bangladesh we can say their activity has been drastically controlled by the security agencies here,” Hasan Mahmood Khandaker, director general of the Rapid Action Battalion, told Reuters. Indian police said they were now looking for Indian suspects and have released sketches of three more men suspected of involvement in the attack. The latest sketches were of men in their late teens to mid-20s believed to have bought bicycles used in the string of explosions that took place along a busy shopping street in Jaipur. An email to local media, from a group calling itself the Indian Mujahideen, claimed responsibility for the attack. Similar claims were made minutes before a blast in Uttar Pradesh state last year. The email also included a video of a bicycle with a bag strapped to it and showed the bike's serial number, which the police said matched with one of the bicycles from the blast site.
