By IANS
Guwahati : At least six people were injured, two of them seriously, in a powerful explosion Thursday inside a hospital in eastern Assam, officials said.
A police spokesman said the bomb went off near the reception counter of the private hospital in Sivasagar town, about 370 km east from here.
"Some people were waiting near the counter for either collecting pathological reports or buying medicines when the explosion took place," Dipak Choudhury, additional police chief of Sivasagar district, told IANS over telephone.
The bomb was concealed in a sack and kept near the reception counter.
The injured were shifted to another hospital with two of them stated to be in critical condition.
Meanwhile, army soldiers defused a bomb planted near the local railway station in the town averting a possible disaster.
"The timely detection of the bomb saved many a precious life with the platform teeming with people waiting to catch local trains," an army commander said.
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 fourth blast in Assam in the past one week – 19 people were injured Sunday in an explosion in Guwahati, while another eight were wounded Friday in a car bomb explosion in eastern Assam.
ULFA in the past two months staged at least a dozen bomb attacks in Assam.
The rebel outfit was also blamed for a string of attacks in January that killed about 80 people, 61 of them Hindi-speaking migrant workers in eastern Assam.