—Dawn

• Looking at the pattern of travel on the special train, one can say that Pakistani families travel more often to India than those of Indian Muslims to Pakistan. One can therefore assume that whoever sabotaged the train knew that only Muslims would die and most of them would be Pakistanis. Does that mean that this dastardly act could not have been perpetrated by Muslims? No, it doesn’t. On the contrary, in fact, on recent record, one is almost reluctant to accuse anyone but Muslim terrorists for this act... India has lately been victim of sabotage and terrorism, but the trend is more associated with Pakistan than with India. Just as the Indians accuse some lashkar or the other every time there is a blast in India, we used to accuse India whenever there was an explosion on our side, until, of course, our noses were rubbed in the evidence that it was our own jihadis who were doing it... Some opposition politicians and the jihadi elements have openly accused President General Pervez Musharraf of having betrayed the Kashmir cause by trying to normalise relations with India. The culprits can be narrowed down further. It could be someone who hates General Musharraf more than he loves fellow Muslims... Why wasn’t the deed done in Pakistan? Simply because then the finger would have pointed to Pakistanis inside Pakistan... Let us keep our fingers crossed and pray it is not a Pakistan-linked terrorist organisation that has killed people going to India to meet their relatives.

—Daily Times

• For his part, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has vowed to trace and punish the culprits. However, given the complexity of the situation, it would be far too early to name possible perpetrators at this stage, as the Indian police have started doing. Their charges yesterday that the banned terrorist outfits Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad were behind the firebombing are so premature they would appear to be a knee-jerk reaction even if they were accurate, and there is no way of being sure they are... Of course, such charges, even if they are incorrect, are not harmful in themselves. But as has happened in the past, they can degenerate into allegations against the other country. This must be avoided at all cost.

—The News