The blame game begins

UP agencies knew about terror strike

LUCKNOW: UP chief minister Mayawati may have cast the blame for Friday’s terror strike at the Centre’s doorstep, but the fact remains that UP has witnessed what the state’s police and intelligence agencies had feared—-and known—-for a long time.

On Friday, Mayawati described the lethal terrorist strike to be the result of a “complete failure of the central government’s intelligence set-up”.

But high-level sources in the police department told DNA that the state’s intelligence agencies were in fact aware of the extremists’ designs to engineer serial blasts in several cities of UP.
A senior intelligence-wing official told this correspondent that the state agencies had definite information that terrorist groups had changed their tactics. “They are now forming and deploying local modules, while in the earlier modus operandi the kingpin was sent from elsewhere in the country, or even from across the border to execute the plot,” he said.

Initial investigations have revealed that in Friday’s attack too, local modules were used in the three cities — Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad. “The terrorists have, in a way, upped the ante for us. It’s even more difficult to track them down when locals are involved,” the official said.

Another change is the explosives used in the attacks. While earlier RDX was invariably used in all terrorist strikes, in the latest incident there is no evidence of it. Steel pellets were found from all blast sites and there were traces of ammonium nitrate, a senior official told DNA, though he added the actual combination would be known only after a detailed chemical analysis.

Besides, the officials also find it quite odd that one live bomb has been recovered from each of the three sites. These are the explosives which did not go off.  A senior police official said it confirmed the hunch that new and local operatives were being mustered in, instead of trained hands. Moreover, he said, even the timer devices found with the bombs were not very sophisticated.

The UP police’s intelligence wing has been tracking the movements of several such local modules. It is indeed no secret that HUJI, JEM and Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) have been using UP as a crucial centre, recruiting jobless youth for their lethal operations.

So, even if Mayawati’s word holds water that the central agencies did fail miserably in warning UP about the latest strike, the state’s failure is no less apparent.