India's insurgency-racked northeast was reeling yesterday from one of its deadliest waves of violence in years, as police reported more killings overnight that brought the death toll to 53 with 141 injured.

A string of bloody blasts and shootouts in adjoining Assam and Nagaland states on Saturday killed at least 44 people. Overnight another five victims died in hospital while four others were killed in fresh violence, police said yesterday.

The attacks came as India Saturday commemorated the birth of the country's independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, a champion of non-violence.

Fifteen people were wounded yesterday when rebels lobbed a grenade at shoppers in a teeming market in northern Assam's Sonitpur district, 180km from the main city Guwahati, a police spokesman said.

Late Saturday, one person was killed when gunmen fired on a train near Bagmari village in eastern Assam's Karbi Anglong district.

In another incident, three National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) militants were killed when an explosive device they were planting exploded in northern Assam's Darrang district early Sunday, police said.

Two bombs strapped to bicycles exploded in markets in different parts of Assam, killing a man and wounding at least 20 people, mostly shoppers.

Two more went off in the streets of the remote towns of Sonari and Baska, near the state's border with Bhutan, wounding another 20 people.

Officials blamed most of the attacks on the outlawed National Democratic Front of Bodoland, which is marking its "Raising Day" since it began fighting for a separate homeland for Bodo tribals in 1985.

The tribals accuse the federal government of plundering the region's natural resources and flooding it with outsiders.

"The NDFB, which was lying low for quite some time, is now desperate," Assam Home Commissioner Biren Kumar Guhain said. "They have carried out these attacks to boost the morale of their cadres and to commemorate the Raising Day." (Reuters, AFP)