A series of bomb blasts has claimed at least 80 lives in a popular tourist district of the city of Jaipur in north India.

Officials said that the death toll was expected to rise after the country’s deadliest terror attack in two years.

More than 150 were injured in six explosions that tore through Jaipur over the course of about 15 minutes, according to police. Television news pictures showed pools of blood amid heaps of mangled bicycles and rickshaws in areas that usually draw bustling evening crowds that regularly include hundreds of tourists.

There was no immediate news of any foreign casualties after the attack, which was aimed at some of the city’s busiest areas, including market places and temples, during the rush hour.

Officials at the British High Commission in Delhi, about 160 miles away from Jaipur, said that they were monitoring the situation closely but that telephone lines to the city’s Sawai Mann Singh hospital, where the injured and dead were being taken, were jammed.

Rajasthan state’s Home Minister, Gulab Chand Kataria, told reporters: “We have information that 80 people have died. One suspect was detained and is being investigated.”

Jaipur, gateway to Rajasthan’s forts and palaces and known as the Pink City because of the colour of many of its buildings, usually attracts about 2,000 Britons at this time of year.

Eyewitnesses said they heard six blasts in quick succession at around 7.30pm local time in the city’s walled district. The explosions triggered a stampede in the narrow streets of the old town, they said. “People started running around and I followed them,” Anil Garg told NDTV, the broadcaster. “There are huge traffic jams. I am very scared.”

Among the dead were a 10-year-old boy at the Hanuman (monkey god) temple, a bride in a bright red sari still wearing marriage bangles and a young man covered in blood who was left hanging over the twisted wreckage of a bicycle rickshaw.

Rajasthan’s head of police, Amorjot Singh Gill, said the incident was obviously a terror attack. The Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, issued a statement condemning the blasts and appealing for calm.

Cities across India, including Delhi and Bombay, have been placed on alert. As many as four other bombs were planted in Jaipur, but failed to explode, reports said.

There was no official comment on potential suspects and no groups had taken responsibility last night. India has been plagued by sporadic bombings in recent years and officials routinely point the finger at foreign-based Islamist terrorists or, more rarely, fundamentalist Hindu groups hoping to trigger communal violence.

There were suggestions from Indian security sources that the latest attacks may have been timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the Pokharan-II nuclear tests, during which India displayed its atomic arsenal, an act taken as a provocative affront by Pakistan at the time. They also suggested that the intensity of the blasts tallied with the use of explosives known to have been adopted by Islamic groups, though they stressed it was too early to make judgments.

India’s Foreign Minister was due to travel to Pakistan, which also lays claim to Kashmir, later this week and there has been a rise in skirmishes in the disputed Himalayan state.

The most recent serious incident was an attack in the southern city of Hyderabad, which claimed 43 lives last August. In October there was another attack in Jaipur, in which two people were killed.

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