The Hindu : Explosion rocks Amritsar court complex

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Feb 20, 2004

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Explosion rocks Amritsar court complex

By Our Staff Correspondent

CHANDIGARH, FEB. 19. Amritsar was today rocked by a powerful explosion. It occurred inside the complex which houses the offices of the district's civil and police administration as well as the district courts. About 20 persons are reported to have been injured, five of them seriously.

Paramjit Singh Gill, DIG (Border Range), Punjab police, ruled out the possibility of a terrorist strike. The Amritsar Superintendent of Police, Kultar Singh, told reporters in Amritsar that only five persons sustained minor injuries.

The roofs of about a dozen adjacent shops and of the offices of some advocates were blown off and about 25 cars, 40 scooters and numerous bicycles, which had been parked in the vicinity, were damaged. The windowpanes of houses in a radius of about one km were shattered. Most of those injured are shop workers, staff of some advocates and labourers.

The area has been cordoned off. Eyewitnesses said that a crater of about 20 feet had formed. Senior police officers, forensic experts from the army, police and paramilitary forces had begun investigations.

The district police said the explosion occurred when a worker set fire to some old papers removed from a `malkhana' (record room) of the court. The record room, which was being cleaned up, is said to have stored case properties that included explosives recovered during the days of terrorism.

Speaking over the phone from Amritsar, Mr. Paramjit Singh Gill said that labour had been deployed since morning to clean up the record room. Various "rejected" items were identified and dumped near a tree close to a parking space.

Mr. Gill said that it appeared that some bag containing high explosives was carried away by mistake and thrown into the dump, which was set on fire after the various offices were closed. A probe would be conducted but official negligence appeared to have caused it.

Mr. Gill who was speaking at the explosion site clarified that the items being removed from the record room were mostly property related to litigation, which had either been disposed of or had been filed as "untraced." The record rooms in various judicial complexes and police stations in the border areas are still stacked with explosives, Kalashnikov assault rifles, grenades and ammunition.

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