200 Die in 13 Synchronized Bombay Bombings : India: Panic spreads as explosions injure 1,100, rock skyscrapers, stock exchange, hotels, airline’s headquarters, suburbs.

A synchronized series of bombs rocked India’s commercial nerve center on Friday, spreading panic in a city still recovering from Hindu-Muslim riots. Up to 200 people were killed and 1,100 wounded.

Thunderous explosions shook skyscrapers, set fire to the nation’s largest stock exchange, gutted the ground floor of India’s international airline’s headquarters, blew apart a passenger bus and damaged three hotels.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the 13 bombs, which detonated over 75 minutes from the southern financial district to the northern suburbs.

But India’s interior minister, Shankarrao Chavan, told Parliament that the wave of terrorism was “an international conspiracy.” He mentioned no country by name, but he has accused Pakistan in the past of trying to stir up domestic trouble in India.

There was no evidence to suggest that the blasts were related to the Hindu-Muslim violence that swept India in December and January.

In a country that has witnessed all manner of ethnic, religious and nationalist violence in 46 years of independence, the devastating assault was a new and terrifying experience.

“There is panic in the whole of Bombay,” said stockbroker Harpreet Kaur.

Hindu and Muslim offices and businesses alike were heavily damaged.

Chief Minister Sharad Pawar, the highest elected official of Maharashtra state, summoned reinforcements of paramilitary troops, fearing another burst of communal bloodshed.

Shortly after the blasts, scattered Hindu-Muslim violence broke out in the city. Witnesses saw mobs burning cars, looting shops and throwing stones.

The riots in January began after Hindu zealots demolished a Muslim shrine in the northern town of Ayodhya. The official death toll nationwide was 1,940, including 600 in Bombay.

Pawar refused to say whom he suspected in the bombing wave.

But he told reporters, “There has to be perfect planning” for this kind of attack.

He advised Bombay’s 12 million residents to be on alert for more bombs, to lock their cars and check the basements of tall buildings. The city, like India as a whole, is about 82% Hindu and 12% Muslim.

Teams of explosives experts from India’s intelligence agencies rushed to Bombay.

Volunteers carried signs asking donors to head to hospitals after doctors reported a severe shortage of blood.

Government officials said most of the bombs were in vehicles, but several also were in unoccupied hotel rooms.

A devastating blast went off in the parking lot beneath the Bombay Stock Exchange building.

About 3,000 people were on the second-story trading floor. “We were all lifted above the ground by 2 feet,” said one trader, Dinesh Acharya. “People fell on each other and ran out.”

Some victims were crushed in the stampede to escape the building.

Outside, burned bodies lay in the litter from shattered buildings. Many of the victims were vendors and stock traders who did business in the street.

Another bomb went off outside Air India headquarters, in a cluster of high-rise commercial buildings in Nariman Point. The building housed two Muslim banks as well as many Hindu businesses.

The Bank of Oman, which leased space on the street level, was destroyed.

Tajder Haider, bloodied from deep gashes on his face, said “there was a total blackout. I opened my eyes and there was nothing in front of me.”

In the fashionable Century Bazaar shopping district, six miles from the stock exchange, a bomb that exploded near a waiting bus blew a 10-foot-by-8-foot crater in the street.

“It was a bed of broken glass and hands, legs and bodies,” said Meena Menon, an Indian reporter. “Some passengers flew in all directions. The driver’s body fell on a building 100 feet away.”

Another car bomb exploded at a gas station near the offices of the Shiv Sena, an extremist Hindu group held responsible for inciting the January riots.

The only recent comparable incident in India was the 1991 assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was blown up by a suicide bomb worn by a woman of the Tamil Tiger guerrillas from Sri Lanka.

Sikh militants have used car bombs in their fight for a separate Sikh state in Punjab.

Muslim militants in Kashmir also have used explosives, including one in 1992 that went off in the office of the police chief as he met the state’s top security officers.