Author: Matthew Rosenberg
Publication: Yahoo News
Date: September 19, 2008
URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080919/ap_on_re_as/as_india_gunbattle
Indian police battled suspected Islamic militants
holed up in a house in the country's capital Friday, killing two and arresting
one before the others escaped, police said.
The gunbattle in a southern part of sprawling
New Delhi put the city back on edge days after five coordinated bombings in
the capital's markets killed 21 people - attacks credited to homegrown Islamic
militants.
A senior New Delhi police officer, Karnal
Singh, told reporters at the scene of Friday's firefight in the Jamia Nagar
neighborhood that there were five gunmen. Two were killed, one was arrested
and two escaped, he said.
Police spokesman Rajan Bhagat said two policemen
were wounded in the fighting.
"A sizable amount of arms and ammunition
was discovered in the house," said Bhagat. "The area has been cordoned
off, and we are continuing our investigation."
Soon after the gunbattle broke out around
noon Friday, scores of police officers, many in riot gear, could be seen fanning
out through Jamia Nagar, a leafy lower middle-class neighborhood. The scene
was chaotic with authorities trying to get civilians out of harm's way while
subduing the militants.
A group calling itself the Indian Mujahideen
has claimed responsibility for the New Delhi attacks. It also said it was
behind bombings that killed 61 people in the western city of Jaipur in May
and July blasts in the western state of Gujarat that killed at least 45.
Police apparently zeroed in Friday on one
New Delhi house after interrogating a man detained after the Gujarat bombings,
The Press Trust of India news agency reported.
The man, identified as Abu Basher, said the
home in quiet Jamia Nagar was used as a safe house by Islamic militants plotting
attacks around India.
The Indian Mujahideen was little known before
this year's bombings, and police believe it may be a front for the Students'
Islamic Movement of India, or SIMI, which was banned in 2001.
India has routinely blamed Pakistan or Bangladesh-based
militant groups for dozens of attacks in the last three years.
But as the death toll has mounted this year,
evidence has pointed to the involvement of Indian Muslims, raising difficult
questions for the government about growing anger among India's large Muslim
minority.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
made a rare acknowledgment that Indians - and not foreign Islamic groups -
may have been behind the New Delhi attacks, but cautioned the country's security
services were facing "vast" intelligence gaps.
Several alleged SIMI activists have been rounded
up in recent months, but police have made little apparent headway in finding
those behind the attacks.
Authorities believe the Islamic militants
aim to spread fear among ordinary Indians and provoke violence between the
country's Hindu majority and Muslim minority.
Relations between Hindus, who make up more
than 80 percent of India's population, and Muslims, who account for about
130 million of India's 1.1 billion people, have been relatively peaceful since
the bloody partition of the subcontinent into India and Muslim Pakistan at
independence from Britain in 1947. But there have been sporadic bouts of violence.
