India hit by new terror attack after bomb kills nine in Pune bakery

India suffered its first major terror attack since the Mumbai massacre when a bomb killed nine people at a café popular with tourists in the western city of Pune on Saturday evening.

The blast struck the popular German Bakery in Pune, 125 miles southeast of Mumbai, about 7.30pm (1400GMT), when the café was packed with diners.

Vinod Dhale, an employee at the bakery which is located in Pune's upmarket Koregaon Park area, said: "We heard a big noise and we all rushed out. The impact was so much that there were tiny body parts everywhere."

At least one foreigner was thought to be among the dead. About 50 injured, including several Iranians and a Taiwanese, were taken to city hospitals. The bomb is thought to have been planted in a bag left under a table.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast, which India’s Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram described earlier as "a significant terrorist incident".

"What was being targeted was a soft target where both foreigners and Indians, especially young people, congregate," he said, after visiting the bomb site and the victims in a nearby hospital earlier today. “All the information available to us at the moment points to a plot to explode a device in a place that is frequented by foreigners as well as Indians.”

The German Bakery is close to the Osho ashram, a controversial free-love commune popular with foreigners, which security agencies had warned was on a target list of Islamist militants. It was also near Pune's Chabad House, a Jewish prayer centre, similar to the one targeted in Mumbai along with two luxury hotels and the city's main train station in November 2008.

The Osho ashram was one of the potential targets allegedly surveyed by David Coleman Headley, an American accused by American authorities of scouting targets for the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist function, the group behind the Mumbai attacks, in which 166 people, including 25 foreigners, were murdered by a group of 10 gunmen. 300 others were injured.

According to Indian officials, Mr Headley, who was at one time an informer to the US visited the ashram in March 2009.

Mr Headley came to the attention of the US security services in 1997 when he was arrested for heroin smuggling in New York. He earned a reduced sentence by working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) by infiltrating Pakistan-linked narcotics gangs.

Indian investigators, who have been denied access to Mr Headley, suspect he remained on the payroll of the US security services, but switched his allegiance to LeT.

"India is looking into whether Headley worked as a double agent," an Indian home ministry official said in December.

No one has claimed responsibility for the Pune attack, police said.

"There was an abandoned bag which seems to have contained some IED [improvised explosive device]," a police official told reporters.

The explosion came a day after India and Pakistan agreed to resume high-level peace talks on February 25, which have been suspended since the Mumbai atrocity.

Premier Says Fraud Tainted Ukraine Vote

MOSCOW — Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko, the apparent loser in Ukraine’s presidential election, declared Saturday night that she would not concede, denouncing the results as having been tainted by widespread fraud.

Offering her first public comment on the election, on Feb. 7, Ms. Tymoshenko said she would go to court to overturn the victory of her opponent, Viktor F. Yanukovich, who was reported to have won by 3.5 percentage points.

“Yanukovich is not our president,” Ms. Tymoshenko said in a televised address to the nation. “He will never become the legitimate elected president of Ukraine under any circumstances.”

Ms. Tymoshenko acknowledged that Ukrainians were weary from years of political instability. She said she would not organize the kind of mass protests that shook the country during the 2004 Orange Revolution, which she helped lead. But she said she was confident that the election would be thrown out.

Still, she faces a significant challenge. European election monitors praised the balloting, saying that it was conducted freely and fairly, and President Obama and other world leaders have called Mr. Yanukovich in recent days to congratulate him.

Mr. Yanukovich, the opposition leader, mounted a comeback in this election after being the loser in the Orange Revolution. He has ties to the Kremlin, and has already indicated that he hopes to improve Ukraine’s relations with Russia.

He has said that Ms. Tymoshenko should concede and resign as prime minister for the good of the nation.

Ms. Tymoshenko had stirred speculation that she might do so by remaining largely out of the public eye in recent days. But she is known for her political intensity, and the tone of her remarks on Saturday night suggested that she would not immediately respond to domestic or international pressure to back down.

Preliminary results showed that Mr. Yanukovich won by roughly 900,000 votes. But Ms. Tymoshenko said that more than a million votes had been falsified in his favor. She said that on the Crimean Peninsula, a Yanukovich stronghold, 3 to 8 percent of the votes had been stolen for him.

She said some election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe would support her in court, though she did not mention which ones. The organization approved of the election.

While not seeking demonstrations, Ms. Tymoshenko appeared to be trying to reignite the Orange movement, which arose after Mr. Yanukovich won the 2004 presidential election and his campaign was accused of fraud. Protests forced a new election, which Mr. Yanukovich lost to Viktor A. Yushchenko.

“Our opponents, as they did in 2004, demonstrated that they are not prepared to be elected by honest, democratic rules,” Ms. Tymoshenko said Saturday night. “They have perfectly well realized that they have no chance of earning the sympathy of the majority of people in a lawful way.”

There are major differences between the current situation and the earlier one. European election monitors assailed the 2004 election won by Mr. Yanukovich as deeply flawed, and many countries would not recognize it. What is more, Ukrainians were more enthusiastic about politics back then.

Now, Ukraine’s economy is hurting from the financial crisis, and the public is disillusioned with infighting in the government.

Gunfire as some Taliban fight Marines in Marjah

MARJAH, Afghanistan — Squads of Marines and Afghan soldiers occupied a majority of the Taliban stronghold of Marjah on Sunday, but gunfire continued as pockets of militants dug in and fought, military officials said.

The second day of the largest offensive since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan was characterized by painstaking house searches and sporadic fighting.

The troops cleared out booby-trapped houses one by one, advancing slowly down streets littered with thousands of homemade bombs and mines. Shots continued to ring out in some neighborhoods.

"We're in the majority of the city at this point," said Lt. Josh Diddams, a Marine spokesman. He said the nature of the resistance has changed from the initial assault, with insurgents now holding ground in some neighborhoods.

"We're starting to come across areas where the insurgents have actually taken up defensive positions," he said. "Initially it was more hit and run."

The Marjah offensive is NATO's most ambitious effort yet to break the militants' grip over their southern heartland.

Using metal detectors and sniffer dogs, U.S. forces found caches of explosives rigged to blow as they went from compound to compound. They also discovered several sniper positions, freshly abandoned and booby-trapped with grenades.

The troops also found two large caches of ammonium nitrate — a common ingredient in explosives — totaling about 8,800 pounds (4,000 kilograms), Diddams said.

NATO said it hoped to secure Marjah, the largest town under Taliban control and a key opium smuggling hub, within days, set up a local government and rush in development aid in a first test of the new U.S. strategy for turning the tide of the 8-year-old war.

At least two shuras, or meetings, have been held with local Afghan residents — one in the northern district of Nad Ali and the other in Marjah itself, NATO said in a statement. Discussions have been "good," and more shuras are planned in coming days as part of a larger strategy to enlist community support for the NATO mission, it said.

Afghan officials said Sunday that at least 27 insurgents had been killed in the operation.

Most of the Taliban appeared to have scattered in the face of overwhelming force, possibly waiting to regroup and stage attacks later to foil the alliance's plan to stabilize the area and expand Afghan government control in the volatile south.

Two NATO soldiers were killed on the first day of the operation — one American and one Briton — according to military officials in their countries. At least seven civilians had been wounded, but there were no reports of deaths, Helmand provincial spokesman Daoud Ahmadi said.

More than 30 transport helicopters ferried troops into the heart of Marjah before dawn Saturday, while British, Afghan and U.S. troops fanned out across the Nad Ali district to the north of the mud-brick town, long a stronghold of the Taliban.

Maj. Gen. Gordon Messenger told reporters in London that British forces "have successfully secured the area militarily" with only sporadic resistance from Taliban forces. A Taliban spokesman insisted their fighters still controlled the town.

President Barack Obama was keeping a close watch on combat operations, White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said.

He said Defense Secretary Robert Gates would have the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, brief Obama on Sunday.

In Marjah, Marines and Afghan troops' advance through the town was impeded by countless land mines, homemade bombs and booby-traps littering the area. Marine ordnance teams blew up several dozen bombs, setting off huge explosions that reverberated through the dusty streets.

On Sunday, most of the Marines said they would have preferred a straight-up gunbattle to the "death at every corner" crawl they faced, though they continued to advance slowly through the town.

"Basically, if you hear the boom, it's good. It means you're still alive after the thing goes off," said Lance Corp. Justin Hennes, 22, of Lakeland, Florida.

Local Marjah residents crept out from hiding after dawn Sunday, some reaching out to Afghan troops partnered with Marine platoons.

"Could you please take the mines out?" Mohammad Kazeem, a local pharmacist, asked the Marines through an interpreter. The entrance to his shop had been completely booby-trapped, without any way for him to re-enter his home, he said.

The bridge over the canal into Marjah from the north was rigged with so many explosives that Marines erected temporary bridges to cross into the town.

"It's just got to be a very slow and deliberate process," said Capt. Joshua Winfrey of Stillwater, Oklahoma, a Marine company commander.

Lt. Col. Brian Christmas, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines, said U.S. troops fought gunbattles in at least four areas of the town and faced "some intense fighting."

To the east, the battalion's Kilo Company was inserted into the town by helicopter without meeting resistance but was then "significantly engaged" as the Marines fanned out from the landing zone, Christmas said.

Marine commanders had said they expected between 400 and 1,000 insurgents — including more than 100 foreign fighters — to be holed up in Marjah, a town of 80,000 people that is the linchpin of the militants' logistical and opium-smuggling network in the south.

The offensive, code-named "Moshtarak," or "Together," was described as the biggest joint operation of the Afghan war, with 15,000 troops involved, including some 7,500 in Marjah itself. The government says Afghan soldiers make up at least half of the offensive's force.

Once Marjah is secured, NATO hopes to quickly deliver aid and provide public services in a bid to win support among the estimated 125,000 people who live in the town and surrounding villages. The Afghans' ability to restore those services is crucial to the success of the operation and in preventing the Taliban from returning.

Associated Press writers Noor Khan in Kandahar, Rahim Faiez and Heidi Vogt in Kabul, and Robert Burns in Washington contributed to this report.