Bengaluru: A day after the Church Street blast that tragically claimed the life of Bhavani, a Chennai housewife and mother of two, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah entrusted the probe into the blast to a locally constituted police team rather than the National Investigative Agency, even as Karnataka police teams headed for Kolar district, to Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu to hunt down the men who tried to strike terror in the heart of the city.
NIA officials based in Bengaluru combed the street alongside police, civil defence personnel and a Forensic Science Laboratory team on Sunday, as a team from NIA Delhi arrived at Church Street on Monday to inspect the blast site.
"Our men had found shrapnel and nails near the spot, on the roads and from adjacent buildings over a distance of more than 20 metres," said Dr. PRS Chetan, Chief Warden, Civil Defence.
The Special Investigation Team (SIT), probing the case said it was still trying to ascertain which terror outfit could be behind the blast while strongly suspecting the hand of Indian Mujahideen (IM) behind the blast.
Based on the pieces of a Telugu newspaper recovered from the actual blast site, the SIT are taking the probe forward.
“We retrieved the Hyderabad edition of a Telugu newspaper with news related to Warangal district wrapped around parts of the bomb. Therefore, we have sent a team to Warangal and Hyderabad to conduct a probe,” top sources said.
Police teams from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala arrived in the city on Monday to confer with city police, who had a two hour meeting with CM Siddaramaiah and his core team, Monday, after which the chief minister called on all restaurants with more than a hundred footfalls to install CCTVs, citing Hyderabad as an example of where it had helped police to track down attackers in the past.
City Police Commissioner M. N. Reddi said the police were in no position to come to a firm conclusion on who was responsible, and ascertain whether it was a lone wolf or a team from IM-SIMI.
He did say however that the city police had received information about three months ago that some SIMI activists, who had escaped from Kandhwa jail last year, might have entered the city.
“The potential of them being involved in the blast cannot be ruled out. However, there was no specific alert, only a general alert,” he added.
