The Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad and the Mumbai crime branch have nothing in their reports worth mentioning about the blasts that killed at least 25 people.
Fifteen days after three blasts ripped through the city killing 25 people and injuring 140, the investigations have reached a dead end.
The Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad and the Mumbai crime branch have nothing in their reports worth mentioning. To make matters worse, terrorists seem to have dumped technology to evade being tracked down by the police.
An officer from one of the central intelligence agencies involved in the investigations said the police had hoped to reconstruct the chain of events and eventually get hold of the terrorists or their accomplices by finding some communication device or anything that would have had electronic footprints. “So far, the police have not found any such thing,” the officer said.
Investigations have shown the terrorists did not use any mobile phones, laptops, emails, or even landline telephones. “This has made it extremely difficult to trace any activity on the internet or phones before and after the blasts,” he said.
Earlier, the joint team of the ATS and the crime branch had announced that they had seized one terabyte of data. Investigators had felt that something positive would come out once they managed to go through the vast amount of data. “But nothing came of it. Even the CCTV footage did not help much,” the officer said.
“Investigators were depending heavily on the footage to find possible clues.”
Investigators are now certain that terrorists have changed their game plan. “In the past, Indian Mujahideen members used to send emails to leading media houses minutes before or after a blast,” another officer, part of the joint team, said. “But such mails stopped after the crime branch busted their media cell in 2008.”
Apart from the joint team of the ATS and the crime branch, officers from the Intelligence Bureau and the National Investigative Agency have fanned out across the state and the country, he said.
“Unfortunately, we have not found anything worthwhile till now. The worrying factor is it would become more and more difficult to track down those behind the 13/7 blasts with the passage of time.
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