The man who was killed in the blast that took place inside Ludhiana district court on Thursday has been identified as Gagandeep Singh, a former cop. He was dismissed from the service in 2019 and spent two years in jail. He was released in the month of September. Gagandeep Singh had drug links, people familiar with the development said.
Police cordoning off the Ludhiana court blast site on Thursday. (Harsimar Pal Singh/HT)
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On Thursday, a bomb went off near the washroom on the second floor of the district court complex killing one person and injuring six others. With all political leaders reaching Ludhiana following the incident, the explosion posed a serious security challenge in front of the state government. According to initial reports, police suspected that the man killed in the explosion had something to do with it. Either he was carrying the explosive device or was trying to assemble, cops said earlier.
The blast prompted Union home secretary Ajay Bhalla to hold a high-level meeting on the security situation in the country on Friday. Intelligence Bureau Director Arvind Kumar, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and National Investigation Agency (NIA) Chief Kuldeep Singh and Border Security Force (BSF) Director General Pankaj Singh were among those present at the meeting that lasted for nearly an hour in the Home Ministry. Senior officials of NIA and Home Ministry were also present in the meeting.
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Union law and justice minister Kiren Rijiju visited the Ludhiana district court on Friday and said the main purpose of his visit was to assure the people of Ludhiana as well as Punjab that by launching a coordinated effort with the state government, this incident will be thoroughly probed.
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Union law and justice minister Kiren Rijiju visited the Ludhiana district court on Friday and said the main purpose of his visit was to assure the people of Ludhiana as well as Punjab that by launching a coordinated effort with the state government, this incident will be thoroughly probed.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
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Home/India News/Ludhiana blast victim identified; former cop who had links to drugs network
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