Pune, India – A bomb has ripped through a restaurant popular with tourists in the western Indian city of Pune, killing nine people.

According to Pune Police Commissioner Satyapal Singh, who said 45 people had been injured, some of them seriously.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Saturday’s blast, which India’s Home Minister P Chidambaram described as “a significant terrorist incident”. The explosion is now suspected to be an improvised explosive device (IED) using an ammonium nitrate fuel oil mix, with RDX as a booster, police sources said. About 7 kg explosives may have been used.

“All the evidence points to a deliberate plot,” Chidambaram said.

The bomb went off in the German Bakery – an established eatery in the Koregaon Park area of the city – at about 7.30pm local time.

The bakery is 100 meters away from the Chabad House, a Jewish cultural and religious center run by the orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement whose members were targeted in the Mumbai attacks.

Rabbi Betzalel Kupchik, from Pune Chabad House, told AFP: “Everyone here is okay. We are on the same street. We are some minutes’ walk away. We heard the bomb.”

Rabbi Kopichik Told Israel Radio that to the best of his knowledge, no Israelis or Jews were in the bakery at the time of the blast, and that a check of local hospitals had yielded no Israeli or Jewish victims. Most of the Israeli tourists who were staying in the area have been located, he said.

Incidentally, Koregaon Park is one of the spots that was receed by American terror suspect, David Coleman Headley, in 2009 for a future terror attack. Headley had stayed in a hotel opposite the Osho ashram, frequented by foreign tourists.

However, the real target that Headley seemed to have surveyed, the NIA suspects, was the Chabad House, as part of his recee of Jewish prayer centres across Delhi, Pushkar, Goa, Mumbai and Pune.

Headley had chosen to stay at hotels close to the Chabad Houses at each or these cities to facilitate his detailed survey of the nooks and crannies of the Israeli centres.

Headley, has pleaded not guilty to 12 terrorism-related charges and remains in custody in Chicago.

(Source: BBC / AFP / News Agencies)