Low-impact blasts hit Pune

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Four small explosions occurred in quick succession in a busy shopping area of Pune on Wednesday evening and one person suffered light injuries, police said.

One explosion was caused by a device hidden in a dustbin at a branch of McDonald's while another went off near a popular theatre, senior police officer Satyapal Singh told NDTV.

"There have been four blasts and one person has been injured," Singh said. "The fourth blast took place in the dustbin of McDonalds."

Television images showed police picking through rubbish strewn from a knocked-over bin, and busy traffic on the street where people were celebrating a festival. The injured person was a cyclist, police said.

New Home Minister, Sushilkumar Shinde, had been due to visit the city in his home state of Maharashtra on Wednesday hours after taking office, but had cancelled the trip due to other commitments, junior home minister Jitendra Singh told NDTV.

In 2010, eight people were killed in a bomb attack on a restaurant in the university town near Mumbai, where coordinated attacks killed 166 people in 2008.

(Reporting by Matthias Williams and Arup Roychoudhury; Writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Michael Roddy)