Bombing puts focus on India's lax security

NEW DELHI -- After a team of gunmen blasted through Mumbai in November 2008, India pledged to overhaul its police forces and root out terrorism nationwide. But not a single suspect in seven bomb blasts in the three years since has been prosecuted.

Experts say the briefcase bombing that killed 12 people Wednesday outside a New Delhi court showed that Indian security remains hapless -- understaffed, poorly trained and ill-equipped -- in the face of continuing terror attacks.

Investigators scrambled yesterday for leads into the latest blast, offering a $10,000 reward for clues, even as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acknowledged "there are weaknesses in our system."

The 2008 Mumbai attack, which killed 166 people, had exposed the crumbling and ineffective state of India's police force. Many of the first officers to arrive were armed only with batons, while closed-circuit footage showed others holding guns awkwardly and struggling to fire.

The well-trained assailants, on the other hand, used sophisticated Internet phone services to coordinate their movements after having surveyed the area using satellite images from Google Earth. The siege lasted 60 hours, and ultimately 10 attackers were killed and the lone surviving gunman was sentenced to death. Two alleged Indian accomplices were acquitted in court, but no one else has been arrested.

The attack was a wake-up call for India's politicians, who quickly promised to modernize law enforcement with better training, newer equipment and a tighter focus on intelligence gathering to stop future attacks.

The government created a National Investigation Agency, calling it India's equivalent to the FBI. But today its staff of about 200 includes fewer than 10 high-level investigators and operates on an $11 million budget that pales, compared with the U.S. agency's budget of more than $16 billion.

Since then, extremists have bombed a cafe frequented by foreigners in the city of Pune, a cricket stadium just before a match, a Hindu prayer site on the Ganges River, and three crowded neighborhoods in Mumbai. There were also attacks outside a renowned mosque in New Delhi and what appeared to be a failed car bombing at the same court that was attacked Wednesday.