GUWAHATI, India — At least six people were injured, four of them critically, in a powerful explosion Wednesday at a crowded marketplace in India's insurgency-hit northeast state of Assam, police said.
"The bomb was strapped to a bicycle and went off in a market area injuring six people," said a police spokesman by telephone from Tezpur town, where the blast occurred.
"The injured were taken to local hospitals with multiple wounds," he said, adding that the victims were shoppers and vendors.
Police in Tezpur, about 180 kilometres (110 miles) north of Assam's main city of Guwahati, blamed the explosion on the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), a banned rebel group fighting for an independent homeland since 1979.
More than 10,000 people have lost their lives to the insurgency in Assam over the past three decades.