Six blasts in UP killed 13 persons

NEW DELHI: Jehadis on Friday trigerred serial blasts in three places in Uttar Pradesh, civil courts in Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad, which left 13 persons dead and over 50 injured.

The attacks are being viewed by the security agencies as a possible jehadi backlash against the refusal of the state’s lawyers to argue cases on behalf of terrorists accused in major attacks including the Ramjanmbhoomi strike, Varanasi blasts and, more recently, the plot to abduct Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.

It was only last week that lawyers at a Lucknow court had manhandled three Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists, arrested by the UP special task force earlier this month in connection with a plot to abduct the Gandhi scion. The bar association also refused to take up their case.

A similar altercation between lawyers and five militants accused in Ramjanambhoomi attack case at the Faizabad court in 2005 and subsequent thrashing of Sankatmochan blasts main accused, Pesh Imam of Phulpur Walilullah, on the premises of a Varanasi court may also explain Friday’s blasts at the two courts.

“The common thread among all the six blasts at Lucknow, Faizabad and Lucknow in the targeting of lawyers and the courts... the angle of revenge against lawyers’ assault on terrorists is very crucial and credible and will be probed by the investigative agencies,” a Union home ministry official here confirmed to ET.

According to an initial assessment of the intelligence agencies based on physical examination of the evidence, ammonium nitrate was the explosive used in Lucknow and Faizabad. The low-intensity bombs, stashed away in a plastic bag planted on a cycle, are essentially seen as a local assembly job as ammonium nitrate is freely available and the operating device was a battery and not a sophisticated timer.

The needle of suspicion automatically points at JeM and Huji, both of which operate in close coordination along with local elements like Simi and have a well-entrenched network across the northern state. UP has, over the last couple of years, witnessed a barrage of terror attacks, including those targetted at the Ayodhya temple, Sankatmochan temple and Shramjeevi Express.

The pattern of Friday’s blasts happening in different cities of the state almost one after the other indicates that the terror strike was meticulously planned and executed with military precision. Even though the attack came barely a week after the terrorists’ assault at the courts, the logistics may not have come in the way given the ready availability of sleeper modules and explosives. Only in May this year, the UP police had recovered 20 kgs of ammonium nitrate from Faizabad.

Though the lawyers’ assault on Jaish terrorists as they were being produced at a Lucknow court last week was public knowledge, not once did the intelligence agencies warn of a possible backlash by the terror outfit’s well-entrenched network in UP.

Chief minister Mayawati was the first to blame Friday’s blasts as an intelligence failure and told newspersons in Lucknow that the Centre had not alerted the state of a possible terror backlash against lawyers. The officials at the Centre, however, said the security agencies and state police have to always be on the alert, whether or not there is any specific intelligence.

But they also acknowledged that even in a state of alert, it is humanly impossible to track explosive devices as the terrorists mostly chose to plant them on cycles, whose ownership cannot be traced in the absence of a number-plate.