“Around 11:30 (p.m.), these people got down, and the blasts happened 15 minutes later,” police Inspector-General Sharad Kumar told a televised news conference in Panipat town, close to the site of the blasts some 80 km (50 miles) outside New Delhi.

One of the men was around 35 or 36 years old, “plumpish” and dark, with a moustache, the second around 26 or 27, wearing a scarf wrapped around his head, Kumar said. Both men were speaking the local Hindi language.

“This is the statement of one of the eyewitnesses,” he said. “On the basis of the witness we have made portraits of the suspects, of these two people.”

Two bombs exploded on a train connecting New Delhi to the northern Pakistani city of Lahore, in what appeared to be an attempt to undermine a peace process between the two countries.

Both countries have condemned the attacks and in a sign that the bombers had failed to aggravate ties, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri was due to arrive in India later on Tuesday for scheduled peace talks.

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf said on Monday the attacks should not undermine peace efforts. “Talks Survive Terror,” the Asian Age splashed on its front page.

While the attack occurred in India, the majority of the victims on the Samjhauta Express were Pakistanis.

There were 67 bodies at the morgue in Panipat, many burnt beyond recognition, while one other person died in a New Delhi hospital overnight, officials said. About a dozen people were also injured.

Pakistani being questioned

The suitcases were packed with plastic bottles of kerosene and petrol, mixed with strips of cloth to prolong the blaze. Two other bombs were planted on the train but failed to explode.

Kumar said police were also questioning a Pakistani national whose name he gave as Usman Mohammed, who claims to have thrown one of the suitcases off the train.

“The suitcase was thrown on the track,” he said. “Usman was there and said he had thrown it. We are verifying it. We are not giving a clean chit. He was drunk.”

The Samjhauta rail service was halted after an attack on New Delhi’s parliament in late 2001 and it resumed in 2004.

A Hindu nationalist group threatened to disrupt the service in 2000, but suspicion for this attack has already fallen on Muslim extremists opposed to the peace process.

Many newspapers criticised on Tuesday security lapses that allowed bombers to board what is meant to be one of the best guarded trains in India.

Some commentators said a perceived lack of security could become a political issue for Manmohan Singh’s government, which faces two key state elections this year.

The attack happened days before the fifth anniversary of a fire on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims that killed 59 people in Godhra in the western state of Gujarat, and sparked communal riots in which around 2,500 people died, most of them Muslims.