In absence of CCTVs at bombed sites, cops are scrutinising footage from a camera for any clues, installed by residents behind a building near Opera House
In absence of CCTVs at bombed sites, cops are scrutinising footage from a camera for any clues, installed by residents behind a building near Opera House
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The Mumbai Police could make little headway into the serial blasts, as no CCTV footage of the explosions was available.
Policemen inspect the site of the bomb explosion at Zaveri Bazar, the first to to be hit
There were no cameras to capture any suspicious movements around the three locations where the IEDs went off.
According to police officials, none of the spots Zaveri Bazar, Opera House and Dadar were under the direct cover of CCTV cameras.
A senior traffic police officer confirmed to MiD DAY that none of the three spots had any cameras overlooking them. The locations of the three blasts were away from the busy traffic junctions, where traffic police usually install cameras.
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The officer further said that the nearest traffic camera was at the Opera House junction, but it would not have captured anything as the scene of the blast is far from the camera's range.
However, Naresh Mehta, secretary of Panchratna Society near Opera House, told MiD DAY that the society had installed an infrared CCTV camera covering the backside of the building, which has the capability to record for 15 days at a stretch, round the clock.
Senior police officials attached to the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) have started screening the same, hoping to get some pointers to the crime.
According to Mehta, the society had installed the camera two years ago.
In the suburbs at the time of the blast, he revealed that the impact of the detonation was so hard that glass shards and dust puffs were blown all the way up to the sixth floor, where his office his located.
Car diluted impact
Investigators suspect that perpetrators had placed the bomb on a bicycle close to a white Wagon R near Khau galli.
The car reduced the impact of the blast, which would have been even more lethal had there been no shield between the crowd milling in the vicinity, mostly people out on a break in the evening.
The police were screening the images minutely. When they did not come up against anything in particular, they requested Mehta for the cam's hard disk to examine the footage more closely in their office later.
Mehta added, "I allowed the police to take the hard disk. I will have to get a new one tomorrow to continue the round-the-clock monitoring of the building and its peripheries."
Mehta is upset with the fact that law enforcing agencies, including the BMC, did not heed the building's complaints of hawkers running food stalls in and around the area for security reasons, despite the region being a no-hawker zone.
The society was always given the condescending response that it need only to bother about its internal affairs, not the issues that fall beyond its building's bounds, residents claim. They are piqued that their warnings about the neighbourhood's vulnerability were disregarded.
Zaveri Bazaar too
The zero-surveillance situation persists at Zaveri Bazaar as well. The bullion market association had recently installed 32 CCTV cameras in the vicinity of the Bazaar but there is no surveillance of the Bazaar itself.
Till the time of going to press, police had not come upon any substantial clue from any of the cameras, said a police official, who did not wish to be named.
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