AT least six people were killed and 30 injured today in a suspected bomb attack in a packed cinema hall in northern India, police and witnesses said.
The explosion occurred as hundreds of people - mainly poor migrant workers - were crammed into a theatre in the industrial city of Ludhiana in northern Punjab state to watch the late-night screening of a new Bollywood comedy.
Police officials in Amritsar, the main city in Punjab, put the toll at six dead and around 30 injured, many of them seriously.
"We were watching the film when I suddenly heard a huge blast and I rushed outside. I saw some four or five bodies inside," an unidentified eyewitness told the Hindi-language Aaj Tak news channel.
Indian television news footage showed at least one body lying on the floor of the cinema, which was strewn with shards of broken glass and bloodstains. Shoes and pieces of torn clothing also littered the blast site.
Indian media reports said the likely cause was a bomb attack, although the Home Ministry in New Delhi said it was still "too early" to draw any conclusions.
India has been hit by a wave of unsolved bomb attacks in recent months that officials have blamed on Pakistani-backed Islamic militants. Punjab, however, was also the scene of a bloody Sikh insurgency in the 1980s.
"We are waiting for the state government and the police to give us a report. The situation is being monitored," a Home Ministry official said, adding that forensic teams were examining the blast site.
News reports said most of those in the cinema hall were young labourers from the impoverished northern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
Security at bus and railway stations and important buildings across the state has been tightened, a Punjab police spokesman said.
The latest blast comes days after two people were killed and nearly a dozen injured on Thursday in a bomb attack near one of India's most revered Islamic shrines in the northern state of Rajasthan.
India sounded a nationwide alert after that attack, which came ahead of Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim festival at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, today, and the Hindu festival of Dussehra on October 21.
In August, 42 people were also killed in twin blasts in the southern technology hub of Hyderabad, while in May 11 people died when a bomb tore through the city's main mosque.
In February, 68 people were killed when bombs hit the "Friendship Express" linking India and Pakistan - another unexplained attack.
The latest blasts come ahead of a scheduled October 22 meeting in New Delhi of senior Indian and Pakistani officials on efforts to combat cross-border militancy.
India accuses Pakistan of not doing enough to prevent Islamic extremists from using its soil as a springboard to launch attacks, especially in Kashmir where a separatist revolt has claimed more than 44,000 lives since 1989.
Pakistan, which launched peace talks with India in 2004, denies the charge.
However the Press Trust of India news agency said officials were "puzzled" by today's cinema blast, and were "unable to ascertain so far whether is was a resurgence of Sikh militancy or a handiwork of Pakistan-based militant outfits".
Punjab, India's only Sikh-majority state with a population of about 25 million, was wracked by a separatist revolt in the 1980's which claimed thousands of lives.
The unrest was fanned after prime minister Indira Gandhi ordered troops into the Golden Temple at Amritsar to evict a Sikh militant sect in 1984. Gandhi's Sikh bodyguards shot her dead later the same year.
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