1993 Bombay bombings

The 1993 Bombay bombings were a series of 12 bomb explosions that took place in Bombay, India on 12 March 1993. The coordinated attacks, carried out in revenge for riots that killed many Muslims, were the most destructive bomb explosions in Indian history. This was first of its kind serial-bomb-blasts across the world. The single-day attacks resulted in 257 fatalities and 717 injuries. Thirteen blasts were announced by the then Chief Minister of Maharashtra Sharad Pawar, the fictitious one in a Muslim quarter of the city, to prevent the events from taking on a communal hue.

The attacks were coordinated by Dawood Ibrahim, don of the Mumbai-based international organised crime syndicate named D-Company. Ibrahim is believed to have ordered and helped organise the bombings in Mumbai, through his subordinates Tiger Memon and Yakub Memon.

The Supreme Court of India gave its judgement on 21 March 2013 after over 20 years of judicial proceedings sentencing the accused. However, the two main suspects in the case, Ibrahim and Tiger Memon, have not yet been arrested or tried. After India's three-judge Supreme Court bench rejected Memon's curative petition, saying the grounds raised by him do not fall within the principles laid down by the apex court in 2002, the Maharashtra state government executed Yakub Memon, on 30 July 2015.

In December 1992 and January 1993, there was widespread rioting in Mumbai following the Babri Masjid demolition in Ayodhya. A series of riots soon erupted throughout the nation, most notably in Mumbai. Five years after the December–January riots, the Srikrishna Commission Report found that nine hundred individuals died and over two thousand were injured.

Three days before the bombings took place on 9 March 1993, a small-time criminal from the Behrampada slum in North east Mumbai named Gul Noor Mohammad Sheikh a.k.a. "Gullu" was detained at the Nav Pada police station. A participant in the communal riots that had rocked Mumbai the previous year, Gullu was also one of the 19 men handpicked by the silver smuggler and chief mastermind, Tiger Memon and sent to Pakistan via Dubai on 19 February 1993, for training of the use of arms and bomb making.