GUWAHATI, Dec 2: Three people were killed and more than 30 wounded on Tuesday in a blast that ripped through a passenger train in the northeastern state of Assam, police officials said.

A police spokesman said the explosion went off as the train was stopped at a railway station about 300 kilometres east of Assam’s main city of Guwahati.

One person died on the spot and two succumbed to their injuries at a local hospital.

“There are a large number of women and children among the casualties,” the spokesman said.

No militant group has claimed responsibility for the explosion, but the outlawed Karbi Longri National Liberation Front, fighting for an independent homeland for the majority Karbi tribe, is known to be active in the area.

Separatist and tribal rebels are often blamed for attacks in Assam state, a remote region riddled by insurgencies over the last few decades.

“It was a bomb placed in one of the coaches, third from the engine,” said Jayanta Sarma, spokesman for the railways in Assam.

The train was heading from Lumding in central Assam to the eastern commercial hub of Tinsukhia, District Magistrate M.C. Sahu said.

Tuesday’s blast comes just days after militants attacked targets across Mumbai, killing at least 172 people and injuring 239. Tuesday’s blast was not seen as related to the Mumbai attacks. The bomb was a timed device, left in a bag on an overhead rack of the train coach and it blew off a part of the roof, said another police official, K.K. Sharma.

While no one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, Sharma said an ethnic insurgent group, Karbi Longri National Liberation Front, fighting for wide autonomy in the state for the past five years, was suspected.

The front is one of the three groups active in the region; the other two groups have reached cease-fire accords with the government. Separately, suspected insurgents shot and killed two migrant workers in the same district on Tuesday, Mahanta said.

The two petty traders from northern India were pulled out from their homes in Dolamara, a village, and fatally shot, he said, blaming the same insurgent group, Karbi Longri National Liberation Front.

Suspected separatists have killed nearly 300 migrants over the past three years in Assam state. They have been targeting thousands of Hindi-speaking migrants from northern states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh who they claim usurp the local population’s job opportunities.

In October, the state witnessed 13 coordinated bomb attacks, which killed 89 people and wounded more than 800 in four towns.

Several insurgents groups are battling for power, for ethnic pride and for control of drug routes in India’s northeast, an isolated collection of seven states and hundreds of ethnic groups and subgroups. They fight the government and they fight each other in a region crippled by poverty and political chaos.—Agencies