NEW DELHI - Police are searching for two suspected Islamic militants who escaped a gunbattle with police in the Indian capital that killed two other suspected militants and a police officer, an official said Saturday.
The two men killed Friday included a man identified only as Atif who police believe played a major role in serial blasts that rocked New Delhi last weekend.
Atif is also suspected of plotting blasts in three other Indian cities this year which killed scores of people in what authorities say were attempts to provoke violence between India's Hindu majority and Muslim minority.
New Delhi Police Commissioner Y.S. Dadwal told reporters Friday that police, acting on a tip, raided a house in Jamia Nagar, a neighbourhood in the southern part of sprawling New Delhi, in hopes of catching those behind the bombings.
A gunbattle ensued and two suspected militants were killed. Another was arrested and two managed to escape, he said, adding that five people were also detained for sheltering the suspects.
One police officer was killed and another was injured in the shooting.
On Saturday, police spokesman Rajan Bhagat said police were searching for the escaped militants but gave no other details.
'Indian Mujahideen' takes credit for market bombings
Friday's gunbattle put the city back on edge days after five market bombings killed 21 people.
A group calling itself the Indian Mujahideen claimed responsibility for the attacks. It also said it was behind bombings that killed 61 people in the western city of Jaipur in May and July blasts in the western state of Gujarat that killed at least 45.
Security forces have come under harsh criticism for failing to stop a series of bomb attacks that have hit Indian cities every few months for three years now.
Part of the problem is that investigators are still not entirely sure whom they are dealing with.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acknowledged that security services faced "vast" intelligence gaps.
He said Indians -- not foreign militants -- may have been behind the New Delhi attacks, a rare acknowledgment that the country is facing homegrown extremists, not just Pakistan- or Bangladesh-based militant groups that have been blamed for many attacks.
Regardless, there is still widespread uncertainty over who the militants are and how they are organized.
The Indian Mujahideen was little known before this year's bombings, and police believe it may be a front for the Students' Islamic Movement of India, which was banned in 2001.
Relations between Hindus, who make up more than 80 per cent of India's population, and Muslims, who account for about 12 per cent, have been relatively peaceful since the bloody partition of the subcontinent into India and Muslim Pakistan at independence from Britain in 1947. But there have been sporadic bouts of violence.
