Saturday will mark a year since the day when an alert passer-by helped avert a major tragedy when he informed the police about an unclaimed black bag lying outside the Ghazipur flower market early morning. Had it not been for him, the improvised explosive device (IED), left there by two men on a motorcycle, would have claimed the lives of hundreds who visit the market.
That afternoon, the bomb disposal squad dug a pit and carried out a controlled explosion at an open space in the market, thus thwarting the first attempted terror attack in the national capital in almost 10 years -- the last successful one was on February 12, 2012, when an Israeli diplomat’s car was attacked with a bomb.
Also Read | Jharkhand: 3 CRPF jawans injured in IED blast; second such incident in 2 days
But a year on, the case remains unsolved. How did the investigation hit a roadblock? Who could be the bombers? HT spoke to different police officers, who worked on the case.
“The two bombers must have been first-timers from outside Delhi. We spotted them in the footage from at least five CCTV cameras near Ghazipur but they could not be identified. For almost two weeks, our officers worked round-the-clock to trace the route the bikers took to flee Ghazipur. The bike was last seen in a footage from near the Anand Vihar terminal that afternoon. After that, no CCTV camera captured the bike or the bikers,” said an officer, who asked not to be named.
{{/usCountry}}“The two bombers must have been first-timers from outside Delhi. We spotted them in the footage from at least five CCTV cameras near Ghazipur but they could not be identified. For almost two weeks, our officers worked round-the-clock to trace the route the bikers took to flee Ghazipur. The bike was last seen in a footage from near the Anand Vihar terminal that afternoon. After that, no CCTV camera captured the bike or the bikers,” said an officer, who asked not to be named.
{{/usCountry}}Also Read: NIA to unravel Pakistani complicity in Rajouri-Poonch terror attacks
About a month later, the bike, a Hero Splendor, was recovered from the Dilshad Garden metro station parking, after a caller informed the police control room about the unclaimed bike left there. When police checked the registration and records, it matched that of the bike seen on the CCTV footage from near Ghazipur market.
“The bike was reported stolen at the Shastri park police station in March 2020. We even checked the fingerprints on the bike but there was no match. The people who used this bike to plant the bomb in Ghazipur that day, or used the bike later, had no criminal record. That made us suspect that the two men who planted the bomb were first-timers,” the first officer said.
MOTORCYCLE FIRST CLUE BUT IT LED TO ANOTHER IED
But the bike did give police their first clue. The photographs of the bike were shown to more than a thousand people in and around Dilshad Garden. “One of our informers confirmed that the bike was often parked below a house in Old Seemapuri. On February 17, our teams reached the building. The building owner said the bike was used by two men, who were tenants on the second floor of the building. They paid a rent of ₹3,500. But the two men left the building about two weeks before we reached there. The owner had also not taken any identification documents before renting them the house,” a second police officer said.
When police broke open the second floor, they found another IED on the bed. Next to it was a black bag resembling the one found in Ghazipur. Police suspect the maker of the two IEDs was the same because of the similar weight (about 3 kilos), the same sort of battery in both devices (a 12-volt Hi-Waote), and the deadly RDX used in both devices.
Police believe the RDX recovered in both IEDs last year must have been supplied from across the border, using drones via the Indo-Pak border in Punjab. Interestingly, within hours of police discovering the IED in Ghazipur, a police team in Punjab had found nearly 5 kilos of RDX and some currency notes in an unclaimed bag on the Attari Bachiwind road in Amritsar, Punjab.
“We think the two men who planted the bomb in Ghazipur panicked when the device got detected before the explosion. For weeks after that, Delhi was on high alert. They may have then abandoned their plans,” the second police officer said.
On Friday, It was business as usual for traders at the flower market. The only marked difference since that fateful day is the increased security measures. Instead of two, the market now has 13 CCTV cameras. Manvir Singh, a market committee member, said, “We have two civil defence volunteers too and have asked for 13 more. The number of security guards has also increased. We regularly tell our employees to inform the police if they see any unclaimed bag.”
THE HUNT FOR THE BOMBERS
Even today, police teams visit their informers in Old Seemapuri, once in a while, hoping to find clues about the two suspected bombers. No resident in this densely populated locality claims to have seen the two men in the past year.
“Our informers in that part of the city are still active. For us, the case is still open,” a third police officer said.
Suhail (34), who lives in the Block D, claims he had seen the two men during their stay in the building. He said, “They were lean men and looked starved. One of them said his name was Faraz. He said he was a student and also worked at a computer shop. I believed him then. But I know now that it was a lie”.