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NEW DELHI: Indian police said Thursday they had foiled a planned bombing attack in New Delhi after seizing a car laden with explosives ahead of a key Hindu festival.
More than five kilograms (11 pounds) of explosives were recovered on Wednesday evening from the car in Ambala in the northern state of Haryana, Deputy Commissioner of Police Arun Kampani told reporters in New Delhi.
The seizure came barely two weeks before the country celebrates the Hindu festival of light, Diwali.
Kampani said police had acted on intelligence that a unit of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group had provided the explosives to a Sikh separatist outfit that planned to trigger the bomb in New Delhi.
“Ambala was the place where the explosives were meant to be exchanged,” he said.
Police also recovered five detonators and two timers from the car outside the Ambala railway station.
The LeT was blamed for the 2008 Mumbai attacks that left 166 dead in India's financial capital.
The last militant strike in Delhi was in September when a bomb outside the High Court killed 14 people -- the latest in a series of blasts that has shaken public confidence in the government's counter-terror capabilities.
Experts say Indian security agencies, and in particular the police, suffer from under funding, a lack of training and poor intelligence gathering and sharing.
