Need To Throw The Net Wider
To Catch Pune Bombers
By Mustafa Khan
18 February, 2010
Countercurrents.org
After the knee-jerk reaction against IM (Indian Mujahideen) there is a belated realization that the Pune blast of February 11, 2010 is a different kettle of fish. It bears the hallmark of another group. It was not for nothing that some conscientious people felt sleepless over the readily prepared and readily available explanation for every next bomb blast on the way.
Could the other group be the still elusive one responsible for Malegaon blast of 2006? That group might have used a couple of SIMI activists but the victims and the people in the town do not buy the argument that SIMI itself was involved. The plain reason is cogent enough. Despite a mammoth population of Muslims there is hardly a mass following of the banned organization. Nor are the people given to terrorism of any sort, notwithstanding, the sporadic outburst of communal riots that take place there.
Lt Col Shrikant Prasad Purohit (the main accused in 2008 Malegaon blast) may be behind the bars but some 500 activists trained at Goa hideout and at Bhonsla Military Schols of Nasik and Pune are still at large. He had stolen 60 kg of RDX from the army stock. Traces of it were found in the house of Sudhakar Chaturvedi in Matunga. Some of it Purohit had kept at his house in Pune. A part of it he had given to one Bhagwan for Samjhauta express incident. Then there is narco test record of the accused in Nanded blats. That analysis shows that explosives were given by Mithun Chakravarth (Purohit?) to the Hindutva activists when they were sent out to their assignment from time to time.
Another source of explosives could be from the scrap collection of Shankar Shelke of Ahmednager. On September 16 2006 the police had seized 195 kg of RDX and some bomb shells. Shelke disappeared without any explanation. May be he wanted to evade arrest. Strangely, he committed suicide on the following day. Aurangabad is often mentioned for the haul of arms and explosives. But little do you know that from the Sarpanch of a village near Aurangabad the police had recovered 300 kg of ammonium nitrate, timers and fusers.
The Superintendent of rural police Mr Rajwardhan had remarked that since Malegaon was a Muslim majority area only Muslims could have planted the bombs. Hindus would not dare to do such a thing. But on record there were Hindus there. They were supposed to be within the cemetery where two bombs had exploded and one did not explode. It is said that eighteen of them received compensations from the government. If this were so how come they were within the graveyard and the mosque located there! All the more puzzling is the fact that the police had assured that beggars would not be allowed to reach the gate or the compound wall. Equally astonishing is that the police were not in sight during the Friday prayer when the bombs went off. Rajwardhan had also said that if any Hindu would have done it he would have planted the bombs at night when the casualty would have been much higher as the crowd would be larger. This is a tell-tale remark. On the day the bombs went off, that is, September 8 2006, a television channel showed repeatedly a rickshaw driver of Pune. He narrated that he had carried two passengers who had reached Pune in the evening. They had come from Malegaon. He heard them wonder why it happened during the day when it was to go off at night. This looks ominous because two years later Sadhvi Pragyasingh Thakur also wondered at the low casualty figure that the bomb explosion at Bhiku chow on September 29 2008 had caused. She was speaking to Ramji Kalsangrah who had planted the bomb and he is still absconding.
It is pertinent to note that even Shiv Sena MLA from the region Dada Bhuse had asserted that Muslims from the town could not have done such a dastardly act. Even so the police who interrogated 20 Hindus let them off. They did not bother to even name them!
Could this be what Kavita Karkare calls (in the context of 26/11 in her forward to Vinita Kamte's book To the Last Bullet) "shameful acts of cover up"?
All these add up to the relevance of Pune.
There are some reasons why this aspect should be thoroughly explored. The IM did not claim responsibility either before or after the blast. If IM is located in Pune in sizable number the least they would want is to arouse the suspicion of investigation authorities. On the other hand Abhinav Bharat is in a different class of its own. Like Sanatan Sansthan its denial is surely going to be accepted by the media without a hubbub created over it. Who now bothers much about Sanatan Sansthan's involvement in Margao, Vashi, Thane and other blasts?
The remote control blast in Pune reminds the commissioner of Pune Satyapal Singh of Malegaon 2006 blast as well as Mumbai local trains bombing of July 2006. In the graveyard in Malegaon the police had found a toy-circuit neatly packed in a plastic box from a place in the cemetery where the bomb did not explode. It could be because it was intended to go off at night while the other two bombs at the cemetery and at Mushawaratchowk went off at around 1.30 prayer time. A tailor from the shopping complex around the graveyard had picked up a corpse without torso with a false beard. It simply disappeared! How sinister!
However, the most sinister was the remark made by ATS chief KP Raghuvanshi. While reacting to the bombs the Hindus were making in Nanded he said with a smirk they were not meant for pooja!
Mustafa Khan is from Malegaon, Maharashtra. He blogs at
http://commonalty.blogspot.com/
