Authorities in India’s commercial capital, Mumbai, declared a “general alert” on Friday after 12 men were convicted of involvement in the bombings of seven commuter trains that killed 188 people and wounded 800 others in July 2006.
The accused, all men from the city’s substantial Muslim community, were found guilty of murder and criminal conspiracy charges and will be sentenced on Monday. They face the death sentence.
Senior officers were reported to be liaising with Muslim community leaders to “gauge the mood” following the verdict.
The attack was one of the bloodiest terrorist strikes in India, and the trial, held in Mumbai, lasted more than seven years.
Prosecutors said the plot originated with Pakistan’s main military spy agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and involved militants from Indian and Pakistan-based extremist organisations.
Raja Thakre, who led the state’s legal team, said he hoped for the most severe sentence possible for the convicted men.
“It is not about me being happy with the verdict. I want that people at large should be happy, because we are concerned with the death of so many innocent persons by terror which has shaken the metropolis,” he told the Indian Express newspaper.
Prosecutors said a team of bombers had been trained by the Lashkar-e-Taiba extremist organisation, based in Pakistan’s Punjab province, who then teamed up with militants from the Students Islamic Movement of India, a banned local network, to carry out the attack.
The bombers placed devices made from pressure cookers packed with a mix of industrial and homemade explosives in crowded train compartments at the height of the rush hour on one of the busiest local train lines.
Saikat Datta, an Indian security expert and journalist who investigated the attacks, said the Mumbai bombings were followed by a series of further strikes across western and northern India.
“Many of these attacks involved similar kinds of bomb and detonators,” Datta said.
The wave of violence culminated in the spectacular operation in November 2008 in which extremists sent from Pakistan attacked commuters, five-star hotels, tourist sites and a Jewish centre in Mumbai.
Pakistan has denied involvement in any of the attacks, which soured relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbours, effectively freezing a nascent peace process.
Nearly 200 witnesses were called during the trial, and 5,500 pages of evidence were produced. One man was acquitted.
Investigators charged 30 people, 13 of whom were Pakistani nationals. Around half of the accused, mainly foreign nationals, are still at large, police say.
The increased police patrols in the wake of the verdict has been prompted by fears of unrest.
However, Ejaz Abbas Naqvi, a Mumbai lawyer who has represented men accused of terrorism, told the Guardian last year that although “the majority of Muslims [in Mumbai] believe that anyone arrested is innocent”, there was still 100% faith in the judiciary.
