Bombay Bombings Leave Cloud of Fears, Suspicions : India: Embittered Muslim, family are tied to deadly blasts. But police suggest wider conspiracy was at work.

At the height of the January riots here, when anti-Muslim mobs butchered and burned more than 750 people and nine days of anarchy reigned in India’s most cosmopolitan city, Yakub Abdul Razak Memon stood in the smoldering shell of his own small shop and surveyed the horrors outside.

He was 28, plump, with short black hair and a thick mustache. A licensed accountant, Memon used the shop for his 200 or so clients, as well as to help his five brothers’ businesses: a small travel agency, a mutton exporting company and, according to police, occasional gold and silver smuggling.

“He was very bitter,” said Prabhat Sharan, a local reporter who met Memon by chance that awful day. “But he said, ‘I don’t blame the people who do this. I blame the politicians who have poisoned their minds.’ ”

Today, Indian authorities blame Memon and his family, who are said to have left the country, for coordinating one of the bloodiest, most ambitious terrorist attacks ever--10 powerful car and suitcase bombs that exploded in a synchronized slaughter on March 12, killing at least 317 people and injuring 1,400 others.

For 2 1/2 terrifying hours on Black Friday, as it is now called, blasts rocked the city from south to north.

The first car bomb gutted a garage under the gleaming new Bombay Stock Exchange tower, as much a symbol of India’s financial capital as the World Trade Center is in New York. Left in the rubble were dozens of bodies, severed limbs and mangled vehicles.

In quick succession, cars packed with plastic explosives blew up next to the Air India headquarters, beside busy downtown bus stops, outside a crowded movie theater and at a gas station near a right-wing Hindu political party office. Suitcase bombs went off inside three luxury hotels. Flames lighted the sky; panic filled the streets.

But it is now clear that the Bombay bombers were planning far worse. “At least 200 or 300 bombs was their intention,” A. S. Samra, Bombay’s police commissioner, said in an interview.

They surely had the means. Shortly after the bombing, police found three parked motor scooters packed with RDX, a putty-like high explosive, and simple, acid-activated, pencil-sized detonators that apparently malfunctioned.

A week later, they recovered a handcart in the gold market with a dozen AK-56 assault rifles (a lighter version of the famed AK-47), plus thousands of rounds of ammunition, almost 200 Austrian-made hand grenades and, most important of all, 600 finger-sized detonators.

A few days later, police hit a jackpot: Gunnysacks packed with more than 2,800 pounds of RDX, plus plastic bags of ammonium nitrate, a compound that can be used in explosives, were seized in a half-built house south of Bombay. A raid the next day netted more detonators, guns and grenades.

On Friday, police found another 2.3 tons of explosives hidden in a creek north of Bombay.

“With this haul, we think we have all the explosives landed during the last two months,” Samra said. But he cautioned that hundreds of weapons are still unaccounted for. “There is no call for optimism yet,” he said.

Visiting American experts are trying to trace the source of the explosives, as well as serial numbers on the guns. But it won’t be easy. Most of the rifle markings were removed. And RDX is widely available; the CIA supplied tons of it to guerrillas fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Police have arrested at least 44 people. But all are bit players, including five local hoodlums who said they were paid to drive the explosive-packed cars. Hundreds of others have been hauled from their homes, detained and interrogated.

So far, the hardest evidence is against the Memons. A locally made maroon van was found the night of the bombings with seven AK-56s and four grenades in the rear. The license plate was traced to Yakub Memon’s wife, Rahin.

And when harried police searched the Memons’ three apartments in a dingy seven-story building in Mahim, a north Bombay quarter known as a haven for Muslim smugglers, they say they found the ignition key to one of the explosive-packed scooters.

“They masterminded the operation here,” said M. N. Singh, a deputy police commissioner who heads the investigation. “But they are just the hands. The brains are somewhere else. The conspiracy is very big.”

And that’s the problem.

Although theories abound, no one knows for certain why the Memons--or anyone else--would try to bring this bustling city of 10 million to its knees. In interviews, police, intelligence officials and diplomats say evidence, so far, suggests a complex international conspiracy that began months ago and involved dozens of people and several chains of command.

But there are far more questions than answers. And facts are clouded by propaganda, rumor and speculation.

What seems most likely is a joint effort by different groups acting for different motives--some for money, some for revenge and religion and others perhaps for politics. Senior government officials insist that the bombs were aimed at disrupting the economy and destabilizing the government.

“Bombay is the economic nerve center of India,” said Murli Deora, an influential member of Parliament and former mayor of Bombay. “Disrupt here and you disrupt the nation.”

What is known is the bombings cost big bucks. All the explosives, detonators and arms were obtained abroad and smuggled by ship into isolated bays south of Bombay in late January and early February, police say. Also, six of the cars and the three motorbikes were brand new; one scooter had only 25 miles on the odometer. The vehicles alone cost almost $70,000.

Far less clear is the role, if any, of India’s archenemy Pakistan. The two neighboring nations have fought three wars since partition in 1947. Indians at all levels invariably blame the Muslim country’s notoriously rogue security agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, for any trouble at home. It’s an emotion-packed issue, and one with grave dangers.

So far, evidence is murky at best. Dinesh Singh, India’s foreign minister, told Parliament last week that nine Memons fled Bombay for Saudi Arabia or Dubai in the United Arab Emirates shortly before the March 12 bombing. But the foreign minister said Yakub Memon and five other family members then boarded a Pakistan International Airlines flight to Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, on March 17. India has demanded their return.

More troubling, several arrested people told police interrogators that up to 20 people were flown from Bombay to Dubai, then on to Karachi in mid-February for a week of terrorist training at an undisclosed location.

“They were looked after, given room and board and trained to handle arms and explosives,” said Singh, the deputy police commissioner.

Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister, has denied any official complicity in the bombing and promised full cooperation to “investigate and apprehend” the missing Memons, if they are in his country.

But few Indians believe him. And if solid proof is found, New Delhi will face tremendous pressure to retaliate.

“I say we declare war!” a young industrialist from one of Bombay’s richest, best-known families said over lunch. “Go in and clear them out once and for all. Enough is enough!”

Whether the bombings were a Muslim retaliation for the riots in January is an equally explosive question. All those arrested, so far, are Muslim, as are the Memons. And senior government officials fear that a hint of an Islamic conspiracy to seek revenge will spark another round of mob terror.

Like most Indian cities, Bombay was rocked by riots in December after Hindu extremists destroyed a revered Muslim mosque in Ayodhya. About 250 people were killed here, most of them Muslims. Many were shot by police sympathetic to the Hindu nationalist cause.

But on Jan. 6, Bombay suffered a far deadlier outbreak of religious violence. For nine days, frenzied mobs led by thugs in the Shiv Sena, a militant right-wing Hindu group, went door-to-door and shop-to-shop, murdering Muslims in slums and high-rises alike. More than 750 people were killed, thousands were wounded and tens of thousands of families fled the city.

“It was a pogrom,” said Asghar Ali Engineer, director of Bombay’s Institute of Islamic Studies. “They targeted entire Muslim communities. All Muslims were affected, rich or poor. Anybody who was Muslim was to be killed, and their shops and homes burned and looted.

“The police either did nothing, or actively joined the looting and burning,” he added angrily.

Criminal gangs joined the violence. Even in normal times, Bombay seethes with vicious underworld turf battles over land, drugs and gold. Many used the chaos to collect extortion and settle scores.

“The city was brought to its knees,” said K. M. S. Ahluwalia, who heads a marketing company and helped found a citizens’ peace group during the riots. “It was anarchy. And there was nothing from the authorities, from the police, from the government, not a bloody word.”

It was in January that Yakub Memon, the obscure accountant, lost his shop. He lived nearby with his parents, his wife and a 6-year-old child. Their three apartments are behind arched Islamic-style doors. Persian carpets cover the floor and a carved wooden swing hangs near a spiral staircase that links the fifth- and sixth-floor flats. Wide windows overlook the hazy Arabian Sea.

Despite their modest lifestyle, the Memons had bank accounts scattered citywide. Press reports say the family regularly transferred tens of thousands of dollars in and out of the country.

Why Yakub Memon might bomb Bombay is unclear. He belongs to the Memon clan of Sunni Muslims. They are mostly small traders and the name is common in the community. He prayed each Friday at a small mosque down the street.

Neighbors say they can’t believe the shy, soft-spoken accountant is involved. He had donated to charities, they say, and offered textbooks to local children after the riots.

“For Yakub, I don’t believe it,” said Abrar Khan, 20, a student who lives down the hall. “It’s out of the question he’d be involved in something like this.”

It’s one reason police now say that Yakub Memon’s older brother and nominal family head, Mustaq Abdul Razak Memon, is a more likely key to the case. Known as “Tiger” for his violent temper, he has known ties to the city’s underworld and more militant Muslims.

Police say he was charged several times in the 1980s with attempted murder, possession of firearms and rioting with firearms. That was in 1989, when he allegedly shot at police while leading a protest against British author Salman Rushdie, condemned to death by Iran for blasphemy for his book “The Satanic Verses.”

“Tiger” Memon fled to Dubai in 1991, police say, but he continued to slip in and out of India to run the family’s smuggling operations to the Middle East. He was most active, police say, in the lucrative hawalla trade, a black-market gold-smuggling and money-laundering scheme to evade India’s strict import and export rules.

Police initially said the Memons bombed Bombay because recent economic reforms, which liberalized import regulations, had disrupted their illegal activities. That theory has lost credence as more evidence has surfaced.

For now, Bombay remains tense. Hotel guests are searched. Streets and restaurants are deserted at night. Police search cars at random. But city leaders insist that life is returning to normal.

“There is nothing to be afraid of,” said M. R. Mayya, executive director of the Bombay Stock Exchange, which resumed trading the Monday after the Friday bombing. “There are bombs at the World Trade Center and 10 Downing Street. These things happen.”

And many doubt that the bombing of Bombay will ever be solved. The conspiracy has too many layers, they say, and the most widely suspected motives--religious revenge or Pakistani provocation--are too explosive to prove.

“It’s too complex,” one diplomat said. “And they will never get to the bottom. That’s the most likely outcome. It’s too sensitive.”