A day after a bomb disposal team removed the shell found within 3km radius of the Punjab chief minister’s residence, police on Wednesday said it did not contain any explosives.
Senior superintendent of police (SSP) Manisha Choudhary said, “The disabled bombshell belonged to an ordnance factory, which is no longer in use. It did not have any explosive content, let alone live explosives. The shell can only be fired from a gun mounted on an armoured fighting vehicle. Hence, there is no question of it being fired.”
Ruling out a terror angle, Choudhary said that the bombshell could have been part of training ammunition, used by the army four-five decades ago, which had been disposed of as scrap.
On January 2, a tubewell operator had alerted authorities about the presence of a bombshell in a mango orchard in Nayagaon, around 3km away from the Punjab chief minister’s (CM’s) residence. The area also houses the official residence of the Haryana CM, the Punjab and Haryana secretariat and assembly and the helipad used by the two CMs.