PUNE: A bomb detonated in a crowded bakery popular with foreigners in western India killed 12 people and wounded more than 50, officials said Sunday, the first terrorist attack in the country since the 2008 Mumbai strikes.

The blast Saturday in the city of Pune, 125 miles (200 kilometers) southeast of Mumbai, threatened to damage new efforts to reduce tensions between India and Pakistan.

“It was a bomb lying in an unattended bag,” Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram told reporters Sunday after visiting the bakery and the wounded in hospitals.

Six people died at the scene and six later succumbed to injuries at hospitals, he said. Of the 57 wounded, 19 were released from medical facilities.

Chidambaram said forensic experts were trying to determine what explosives were used and how the bomb was triggered.

“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,” Chidambaram said.

Security forces were put on high alert Sunday at airports, train stations and markets across the country.

Home Secretary G.K. Pillai said the blast occurred at 7:30 p.m. at the German Bakery, near the Osho Ashram, a renowned meditation center.

Pillai said the ashram, about 200 yards (meters) from the bakery, had been surveyed by David Headley who is facing charges in Chicago for allegedly scouting targets for the Mumbai attack.

Chidambaram told reporters Headley had also observed the Chabad Jewish center near the bakery in Pune.

“This particular area has been on the radar (of terrorists) for quite some time,” Chidambaram said. “Police were sensitized that Chabad House was a target, so was the Osho Ashram.”

He said one or two people acting as customers left a backpack carrying the bomb inside the bakery.

“It appears that an unattended package was noticed in the bakery by one of the waiters who apparently attempted to open the package when the blast took place,” Pillai told reporters.

One foreigner was among the dead, but his nationality was not immediately known, Pillai said. Chidambaram said a Sudanese national was among the wounded in the blast.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan News: Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani said on Thursday that Balochistan leadership was onboard on the socio-economic uplift package of the province announced by the government in joint session of the parliament on Tuesday.

The premier said that many missing persons were recovered within 2-3 days of promulgation of the package. He pledged that the package would be thoroughly enforced with its letter and spirit.

He said some 5000 jobs had been would offered to Balochistan graduates.

Gilani said that a cabinet committee has been set up for enforcement of the announced package adding that parliament would fine-tune the package.

Gilani ruled out the impression that the package has been refused by Balochistan politicians, and added that it had been presented in the National Assembly to seek recommendations rather than the approval of the house.

“The government wants to initiate dialogues with the absconding leadership of Baloch nationalists either they are in the country or in abroad,” Gilani said. The government would take steps to bring the Baloch youth to national mainstream, he added.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan News: The government will unfold a promised package on Balochistan in parliament today (Tuesday) in a major political move to appease the long-standing dissent in the troubled province.

The National Assembly and Senate will meet in a joint sitting called by President Asif Ali Zardari at 3pm to hear from Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani a likely set of both political and administrative ways to peacefully address what is usually called the ‘Balochistan problem’.

The prime minister had last-minute discussions on Monday with the president and a parliamentary committee that formulated the proposals for the package, which a presidential spokesman said in a statement ‘contains a series of constitutional reforms, economic measures and administrative steps to assuage the hurt feelings of the people of Balochistan’.

The joint sitting will likely be prorogued after the presentation of the package, which a parliamentary source of the ruling party said could be debated in another joint sitting for approval after Eidul Azha, which falls on Nov 28.

Though the government has refrained from revealing any details, its spokesmen have said the document will be based on the report of the parliamentary committee headed by Senator Raza Rabbani of the Pakistan People’s Party and also draw on the recommendations of a committee of the previous parliament, which Gen Musharraf had ignored.

But there has been widespread speculation about the possibility of announcing confidence-building measures like giving up plans to construct new military cantonments in the province opposed by Baloch nationalists, a general amnesty for dissidents fighting security forces in the mountains and blamed for acts of sabotage like bomb blasts to blow up gas pipelines and electricity pylons, and assurances of provincial control over the newly-built Gwadar port and main mineral projects.

What has now developed into a low-intensity insurgency revolves around the Baloch demand for the control of natural resources of the country’s largest but least populated province and more provincial autonomy as well as grouse about lack of economic and social development compared to other provinces.

The package is likely to come up mainly with short-term administrative and political measures while the issue of autonomy could wait for constitutional amendments, which are being considered by another Rabbani-headed joint parliamentary committee and which could apply to all the four provinces.

Its very official name of ‘Aghaz-e-Haqooq-e-Balochistan’ (the beginning of the rights of Balochistan) indicates the package is not intended to solve all problems that have afflicted the province since the early days of Pakistan, marked by armed revolts and exiles of nationalist leaders and activists, some of whom even espoused secessionist plans.

While successive military regimes preferred military means over political dialogue, the first major initiative of a civilian leader in Balochistan was taken in the 1970s by then PPP prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto whose forward policy was a mix of politics, abolition of the Sardari system and use of contradictions between the Sardars, and military force that he could not accomplish before being toppled by a 1977 military coup.

Efforts of several months have gone into the formulation of the package, including direct and indirect contacts of the president and the prime minister with the Baloch leaders, dissidents, opposition politicians, including Pakistan Muslim League-N leader Nawaz Sharif, and allies in the ruling coalition.

An official statement quoted Gilani as calling the package in his meeting with the parliamentary committee as a ‘historical step forward which he hoped would ‘go a long way in redressing the grievances and removing the sense of deprivation among the people of Balochistan and will strengthen the federation of Pakistan’.

It said the meeting reviewed and deliberated the final draft prepared by the committee ‘in consultation with all the stake-holders and political leadership of the country’.