Officials: Boat carrying explosives blows up off Indian coast

A "suspect boat carrying explosives" blew up near the maritime border between India and Pakistan in the Arabian Sea, killing all four people on board, after the Indian coast guard tried to stop and search it, the Indian government said Friday.

According to a statement released by India's defense ministry on Friday, Indian authorities received intelligence on Dec. 31 that a fishing boat from a port near Karachi, Pakistan, "was planning some illicit transaction in Arabian Sea." The defense ministry said that Indian Coast Guard ships and aircraft tried to intercept the boat in the early morning hours of Jan. 1 near the maritime border with Pakistan, around 225 miles from the coastal state of Gujarat. "However, the boat increased speed and tried to escape away from the Indian side of maritime boundary," a defense ministry statement said.

It was not possible to verify the Indian account independently.

The defense ministry said that the boat stopped after warning shots were fired, but the four-man crew then hid themselves below deck and set the boat on fire, triggering a large explosion. There were no apparent survivors, the statement said.

Pakistan's foreign ministry said it was unclear whether the incident had happened at all. 

Indian newspapers highlighted the similarites between the account of this incident and the Nov. 26, 2008 Mumbai attacks, in which Pakistani gunmen slipped into India's financial capital by sea and began a 60-hour siege that left 166 people dead. The Hindu, a prominent Indian newspaper, said under its homepage headline that the Coast Guard had averted "a 26/11 Mumbai terror attack."  

Dawn, a leading Pakistani newspaper, said that "Indian media has played up the event, alleging that a terror threat was imminent," with the paper adding "links to terrorism have not been established or claimed."

Fishermen are frequently arrested by both countries as the maritime border in the Arabian Sea is poorly defined and fishing boats often lack the technology to know their precise location.

The Indian coast guard ruled out the explosion being an accident. "If they weren't doing anything wrong, then they had no reason to run, to set the boat on fire. Why would anyone set [themselves] on fire?" said K.R. Nautiyal, Deputy Inspector General of the Indian Coast Guard. India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, called the latest incident a "possible terror operation.”

The country has put its security agencies on nationwide alert last month for a potential attack in the lead-up to a visit by U.S. President Barack Obama at the end of January. There were also Indian media reports on Friday that the Coast Guard had intercepted two other boats deemed suspicious in the same area. 

India's vulnerability to attacks was exposed in 2008 after the assault by Pakistani gunmen on Mumbai. The New York Times reported in December that British and Indian intelligence officials had been tracking the technology chief of the Pakistani armed group Lashkar-e-Taiba, believed to have been behind the Mumbai attacks, but despite that surveillance, and other information from U.S. intelligence, India was unable to stop the attack.

Ten Pakistani gunmen arrived on a rubber boat in Mumbai and launched a commando-style assault on two luxury hotels, a train station, a cafe and a Jewish center that killed 166 people. Since the attack, India has upgraded coastal security, spending money on patrol vessels, helicopters and building a coastal radar network.

India also reacted furiously last month to a Pakistani court's decision to grant bail to the alleged mastermind of the Mumbai attacks, although he has since been detained again.

Clashes between India and Pakistan have also risen of late in the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir. Indian border forces killed four Pakistani troops on New Year's Eve, ending a year in which hopes for reconciliation between the nuclear-armed neighbors faded. 

Al Jazeera and wire services