Agencies probing the blast looking for similarities in patterns

BENGALURU: With no credible leads so far, multiple investigation agencies probing the blast are looking for similarities in patterns from previous blasts in Bengaluru. “We are looking at previous blasts for similarities and differences,” said City Police Commissioner MN Reddi. “We are going through a complicated decision-making process. It is too early to come up with conjectures,” he said.

A special investigation team of the Bengaluru police along with teams of the National Investigation Agency and Intelligence Bureau are working to crack the Sunday blast -- a pipe bomb with a timer. Ironically, less than an hour before the blast, Cubbon Park police officers were on MG Road, close to Church Street, discussing bandobust for New Year’s eve.

The SIT, headed by Additional Commissioner of Police (Law and Order) Alok Kumar, is analyzing CCTV footage from all establishments on Church Street, but nothing concrete has emerged so far. “The images are blurred and we are trying to use a software to address this. There are no credible leads as yet,” Kumar said. Coconut Grove, a restaurant outside which the bomb was placed, hidden behind bushes, has no CCTV. “For us to recreate the scene like we did in the Malleswaram blast, we need to know in which direction the perpetrators came from. We are yet to determine these facts,” Kumar said. There is also little outcome from questioning those in the vicinity of the blast, he added. When asked if the blast was a revenge for the arrest of ISIS propagandist Mehdi Masroor Biswas, Kumar said it was one of the several angles in the investigation.

Be it the 2008 serial blasts that killed two and injured about 20, the 2010 Chinnaswamy stadium blast or the one that went off Sunday, perpetrators have used low-intensity crude bombs. Have the cops spotted a trend? Reddi does not have a clear answer. “I’m not sure how we can conjecture at this point,” he told ET.