The Hindu : Front Page : Forensics link Gujarat bombings to earlier strikes

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Thursday, Aug 07, 2008
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Forensics link Gujarat bombings to earlier strikes

Praveen Swami

AHMEDABAD: Forensic investigators have concluded that the Improvised Explosive Devices used in July’s serial bombings in Gujarat were constructed by the same bomb-makers responsible for a string of earlier attacks in Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.

Experts from the Gujarat police and the National Bomb Data Centre have determined that the IEDs deployed in Ahmedabad and Surat were identical in their design to the devices used in the May 2008 serial bombings in Jaipur; the November 2007 attacks on trial-court buildings in Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad; the August 2007 bombings at the Gokul Chat Bhandra in Hyderabad; and the March 2006 attack on the Sankat Mochan temple in Varanasi.

“The evidence suggests,” a senior Gujarat police official told The Hindu, “that either the same bomb-makers built these IEDs or that the people who made them were trained by the same experts.”

In each case, the IEDs were cased between a curved metal plate, to give direction to the explosion, and a flat piece of wood with small winglets at its end. While the specific explosive used in the bombings varied — one Uttar Pradesh court-complex IED, for example, used the military-grade explosive RDX; the bombs in Hyderabad used a commercially-sold ammonium-nitrate based slurry explosive; and in the Gujarat strikes it was ammonium nitrate fertilizer mixed with fuel — the design was constant.

Police scanning cell records

Some of the bombs were triggered using cheap alarm clocks as timers. However, the Gujarat bombers also fitted cheap Thai-manufactured integrated circuits, widely used for the manufacture of remote control toys, to the IEDs. Police are scanning cell records to see if mobile phones were used to activate these integrated-circuit-fitted bombs.

Police say the bombs found in Surat failed to work because of defective integrated circuits.

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