Indian Muslims Bury Dead After Mosque Blasts

A boy, injured from a blast, lies next to his mother at a hospital in Malegaon. (Reuters)

Mohammed Arif had taken his 8-year-old son to the mosque. Hours later, he returned to the graveyard, this time to bury his son who was killed by a blast.

"I was there, just a little behind him as he was getting out of the mosque. He just fell with the loud sound," Arif told Reuters, weeping with his head held in his hands.

"We took him to hospital, but everything was over."

Rains lashed as a cleric read out prayers and the young boy's body wrapped in cloth was lowered into a small grave a little after daybreak on Saturday.

Around him, many more graves had been dug and more bodies were lowered into them.

Three near-simultaneous blasts targeted Muslim worshippers leaving the Nurani mosque in the religiously-divided town of Malegaon in western India, the scene of previous clashes between Hindus and Muslims.

One bomb went off inside the mosque's courtyard, another outside its gate and a third in the nearby town square.

Television pictures showed men and boys trampling on bloodied bodies as they battled to escape through a tunnel from the walled mosque compound.

Bystanders hauled children to safety as survivors loaded bodies into sheets and on to hand carts.

Political leaders appealed for calm as Muslims kept an overnight vigil.

The president of the ruling Congress Party Sonia Gandhi and Home Minister Shivraj Patil visited the site of the blasts and some of the 277 injured in hospital.

Nobody has claimed responsibility for Friday's bloodshed,

Extra police were drafted in to guard the mosque's graveyard Saturday. They were also posted on street corners after sporadic violence flared. Officers were stoned by an angry mob after the blasts.

Many Children Killed

Twisted bicycles, bloodied clothes and torn slippers lay strewn around the half-century-old Hamidia mosque.

The blasts had ripped off concrete from the walls, which were at places splattered with blood.

Police and some residents suspect the bombs were kept in metal tins or lunch boxes filled with metal pellets.

"When we came out of the mosque we saw bodies all around, many of them children," said Azar Amir Ahmad Mohammed, a weaver.

The blasts came days after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that intelligence agencies had warned of more terrorist attacks across the country, possibly against economic and religious targets as well as on nuclear installations.

Two months ago, bomb blasts on commuter trains in Mumbai, India's financial hub, killed 186 people.

The attacks, blamed but not claimed by Muslim groups, resulted in increased police raids on the city's Muslim areas and the detention of hundreds.

Indian Muslims have complained of increased harassment since the attacks.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has underlined the urgent need to counter a sense of alienation among the country's 140 million Muslims and champion a pro-active policy to ensure that they would not pay for the actions of a few extremists.