MORE than 30 people were killed yesterday when two explosions ripped through crowds outside a mosque and a Muslim cemetery in Malegaon, a town in western India with a history of religious violence.

The authorities imposed a curfew on the town, in the state of Maharashtra, and sent riot police to prevent retaliatory attacks by Muslims.

The explosions came almost two months after a series of bombs — blamed on Islamist groups with links to Pakistan — killed 186 people on commuter trains in Bombay, about 160 miles (260km) southwest of Malegaon.

Only two days ago Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, warned the country that there could be more such terrorist attacks — on economic and religious targets as well as nuclear installations.

Vilasrao Deshmukh, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra, said that the two bombs, both attached to bicycles, outside the crowded Nurani mosque killed 31 people and injured 100. “It is a terrorist act. It is done by people who don’t want peace,” he said.

Police said that thousands of people had gathered at the mosque and the burial ground for regular Friday prayers and to mark the Shab-e-Barat, or Night of Fortune, when Muslims pray for the dead.

Television footage showed people stampeding away from the mosque shortly after the explosion, some jumping over corpses while others stopped to load bleeding casualties on to handcarts.

Later, angry mobs shouted anti-Government slogans and scuffled with police, raising fears of further violence in the town, whose population of 500,000 is about 75 per cent Muslim.

Malegaon has suffered regular outbreaks of religious conflict since 1962, most recently in 2001 when 15 people were killed in rioting between Hindus and Muslims.

P. S. Pasricha, the director-general of police in Maharashtra, said that the entire state had been put on high alert to prevent further bloodshed.

“The motive appears to be to create panic and make Hindus and Muslims fight with each other,” he said.

He said that seven police officers had been injured in clashes with crowds in Malegaon, but insisted that the situation was under control.

“We have activated all police machinery to ensure that communal harmony is maintained,” he said.

The explosions have come four days before the verdicts are due to be announced for 123 defendants in a trial linked to the 1993 bomb attacks in Bombay that killed 257.

Those bombings were blamed on underworld figures and Islamic militants retaliating for Hindu-Muslim riots in 1992-93, triggered by the demolition of a mosque at Ayodhya, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, by Hindu zealots.

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