Mumbai blasts a boon for Delhi police?

City cops are hoping they can find clues to the yet unsolved Jama Masjid and High Court attack cases based on investigations into Wednesday's incident

Mumbai blasts a boon for Delhi police?

City cops are hoping they can find clues to the yet unsolved Jama Masjid and High Court attack cases based on investigations into Wednesday's incident

There's another side to everything. But you would be wracking your brains for hours to figure out a positive in Wednesday's terrorist attack on Mumbai. Well, Delhi police have found one. While Mumbai cops have just begun investigations into the series of blasts, their counterparts here are hoping they can piggyback on the probe and get clues to their yet unsolved cases of terrorist attacks at Jama Masjid and Delhi high court.
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Remember? Scenes after the Jama Masjid attack. file pic

Sources in Delhi police told MiD DAY that investigations in these cases had ostensibly come to a standstill and there was no way forward. "We are now trying to get a lead from this incident as the same terrorist organisation - Indian Mujahideen - which we suspect is involved in our cases, is coming out as the probable guilty party behind the blasts," a senior Delhi police official said, on condition of anonymity.u00a0Sources also said that it is strange that now, unlike earlier, the perpetrators don't send any e-mails after even executing their plans properly.

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"We were expecting an e-mail this time around. But it seems that the assailants have taken note of the fact that sending mails could leak some leads to investigators," the police sources said. "No organisation has taken responsibility (for the blasts)," home minister, P Chidambaram said yesterday. Besides, there are now hardly any mobile phone numbers available with cops, which could be used to dig deeper.

"We will try and find out some clues related to Delhi to start our investigation afresh. We hope to get results from that," a senior investigator said. Delhi police senior officers, after taking a meeting of their inspectors, stressed on verifying details of all PCOs in Delhi and scrutinise calls which were made to Azamgarh in the past few days.

"We have also asked officers to ask the PCO owners to prepare a record of the numbers dialled by visitors," a senior official said. Meanwhile, after visiting the sites of the three blasts, Union Home Minister P Chidambaram made it clear on Thursday that it was too early "to point a finger at any one group". Addressing a 70-minute joint news conference with Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan, Chidambaram also said "there was no intelligence failure" on the part of central and state agencies.

There was no intelligence input either with the Central or state agencies of an "imminent" attack, he said. "Intelligence is collected every day, every hour. It (blasts) is not a failure of intelligence agencies...whoever has perpetrated the attacks has worked in a very clandestine manner," Chidambaram said, reiterating it was a "coordinated terror attack".

No hope!
The minister said intelligence gathering had successfully "neutralised" a number of planned attacks in the past two and a half years, but declined to give any details. At the same time, he asserted that Indians lived "in the most troubled neighbourhood in the world" and therefore all cities in India were "vulnerable" to attack.

Chidambaram said ammonium nitrate, an explosive substance, was used in the Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) triggered by timers. He ruled out the use of remote control to trigger the blasts in Zaveri Bazar, Opera House and Dadar areas. "We are not pointing a finger at this stage," Chidambaram said, adding there had been no claim of responsibility for the attack. "All groups hostile to India are on the radar. We are not ruling out anything, we are not ruling in anything. We are looking at everyone," he said.