The New Delhi court buildings were evacuated as police blocked off the area New Delhi – AFP Police in Indian Kashmir detained three men in connection with a bomb attack outside New Delhi\'s High Court, as the prime minister acknowledged systemic \"weaknesses\" in domestic security. Wednesday\'s powerful blast ripped through a crowd of litigants queuing to enter the court complex in the heart of the Indian capital, killing 12 people and injuring nearly 80. It was the latest in a long list of bombings in Indian cities and prompted searching questions in the national media about the authorities\' inability to prevent such attacks or to bring the perpetrators to justice. Police released sketches of two suspects wanted for questioning and a search was also under way for a car that may have been used by the bombers.
Investigators are studying an emailed claim of responsibility purportedly sent from Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (HuJI), a Pakistan-based Islamist militant group linked to previous attacks on Indian soil. The mail was tracked to a cybercafe in India\'s Muslim-majority Kashmir region and police said two brothers who owned the cafe and one employee had been taken in for questioning. No formal arrests have been made. \"We have some leads but it is too early to say which group is behind it,\" Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told reporters on his plane as he returned late Wednesday from an official visit to Bangladesh. \"There are obviously unresolved problems and weaknesses in our system and the terrorists are taking advantage of that,\" Singh said. \"We must work hard to plug those weaknesses,\" he added.
It was the first major attack on Indian soil since triple blasts in Mumbai on July 13 killed 26 people. It has still not been established who carried out those bombings. The Delhi High Court had also been targeted four months ago, when a low-intensity bomb exploded in the parking lot, causing no casualties and only minimal damage. With some experts suggesting the May attack had been a dry run for Wednesday\'s blast, a number of editorials in the national press questioned why security at the court had not been tightened. \"With cars spilling out of the car park and no security check worth its name installed, it was a veritable invitation for anyone seeking to perpetrate violence,\" said the Hindustan Times. \"The excuse of \'not being able to prevent every attack\' is wearing perilously thin,\" the newspaper said.
Highlighting the fact that no blast case in the last two years has been solved, The Times of India said it was \"truly shocking\" that the court could have been successfully targeted twice in such a brief space of time. \"This speaks of an extraordinarily lax security culture,\" the Times said. Home Minister P. Chidambaram held a high-level meeting Thursday at which National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon was also present to take stock of the situation.
The United States, France, Britain and Pakistan all condemned the bombing, with Washington describing it as \"cowardly\".
The attack came just a few days before the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon. The area around the High Court remained cordoned off as forensic teams picked through the rubble of the bomb that blew out a deep crater next to one of the court\'s main entrances. The investigation is being run by the National Investigation Agency (NIA), a body set up in the wake of the 2008 Mumbai attacks by Islamist gunmen that left 166 people dead. NIA director general S.C. Sinha said they were taking the supposed HuJI e-mail claim seriously but added that it would be \"very premature\" to confirm who was behind the bombing. The mail warned that other courts would be targeted unless authorities repealed the death sentence on a man convicted for conspiring in a 2001 Islamist militant attack on India\'s parliament.