By IANS
Guwahati : At least eight people were wounded, three of them critically, in a powerful explosion at a marketplace in Assam’s Tinsukia town Friday.
A police spokesperson said the blast took place near a grocery wholesale market in the heart of Tinsukia, 490 km east of Assam’s main city of Guwahati.
“The bomb was kept on a car and was probably meant for planting somewhere else, but went off all of a sudden,” senior police official Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta told IANS.
The injured were all civilians – either morning shoppers or vendors.
“The car carrying the bomb was ripped apart in the explosion although there were no occupants inside the vehicle. Three of the eight injured who have been shifted to a hospital are stated to be critical,” S. Gohain, another police official, said from Tinsukia.
Police blamed the blast on the outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), a rebel group fighting for an independent Assamese homeland since 1979.
This is the second blast in two days in the state — on Thursday two people were critically wounded in an explosion at a warehouse in Guwahati city.
The ULFA in the past two months have staged a dozen bomb attacks in Assam.
The ULFA has also been blamed for a string of attacks in January that killed about 80 people, 61 of them Hindi-speaking migrant workers in eastern Assam. An Indian home ministry report released earlier this week said 99 civilians were killed by the ULFA in 156 incidents in Assam from January to March 31.
New Delhi launched a massive military offensive against the ULFA after the strikes killing 55 rebels and arresting 553 more cadres since January.
More than 10,000 people have lost their lives to insurgency in Assam during the past two decades.