An outlawed separatist group in India, the United Liberation Front of Assam, has said it was responsible for a bomb explosion at a railway station which killed at least nine people and injured more than eighty.

The bomb went off at New Jalpaiguri in West Bengal four hundred kilometres north of Calcutta and disrupted train services from northeast India to the rest of the country.

Indian officials have blamed agents of Pakistan for the attack and say the statement admitting responsibility was on their instructions.

They say the intention was to disrupt the transfer of soldiers on their way to the conflict in Kashmir.