By IRNA
Guwahati : Three people were killed and 50 wounded, including four policemen, in a grenade explosion at a religious festival in India’s restive northeastern state of Assam, officials said.
A police spokesman said the incident took place late Saturday night when a grenade was lobbed at a festival organized by the Mising tribe at Jonai town, about 560 km east of Assam’s main city of Guwahati.
“The Mising community was celebrating their spring festival Ali-Ai-Ligang when the grenade attack took place in which three people, including a woman, were killed and 50 more injured,” police official B. Das said.
Four policemen were among those wounded in the attack.
The injured were shifted to hospitals with multiple wounds.
“Two of the injured were stated to be in critical conditions,” the official said.
Locals caught hold a 16-year-old boy soon after the blast suspecting him of lobbing the grenade.
“The boy was severely beaten by the crowd, but we do not know for sure if he was actually involved in carrying out the attack,” Das said.
There were about 500 people at the venue when the attack took place.
Assam is currently rocked by a series of explosions with police blaming the ULFA for staging at least a dozen blasts during the past two weeks. Six persons were killed and more than 100 injured in the serial blasts.
The ULFA is observing Sunday as the outfit’s army day and hence believed to be stepping up violence to make its presence felt, police officials said.
More than 10,000 people have died of insurgency in Assam during the past two decades.