City

On the blast trail

It’s been nearly seven months since the German Bakery blast, and finally, there is some headway. Mirror looks back on the attack that rocked the city and the path that led to the suspects

Posted On Thursday, September 09, 2010 at 01:22:56 AM

The injured being shifted to hospital after the German Bakery blast on February 13

That fateful night
On Saturday, February 13, a powerful bomb ripped through German Bakery in Koregaon Park at approximately 7.30 pm. Nine people, including five women and a foreigner, were killed and 32 others injured.

This was the first major attack since the 26/11 carnage in Mumbai. The improvised explosive device, kept in an unattended packet outside the kitchen of the German Bakery, exploded when a waiter attempted to open it.

While some foreigners were believed to be among the dead, a senior police official said it was difficult to confirm their identity and nationality, as their faces were charred beyond recognition.

Why terror came to Pune
The German Bakery is one of Pune’s most iconic spots. The bakery was almost always full of people and attracted a lot of foreigners.

Osho Ashram is only a lane away from the German Bakery. The bakery is only metres away from Chabad House. By setting off a blast at the bakery, terrorists could have been sending a grim message to foreigners as well as Jews.

The bakery is located close to many sensitive army establishments — the headquarters of the army’s Southern Command are nearby.

The bakery had two entrances and was always crowded, so for someone to slip away unnoticed was not really a problem.

Were we alert enough?
Pune was on the terror map
Maharashtra had been issued an advisory on October 12, 2009, that the suspected American Lashkar.

operative David Headley had surveyed the area around the Osho Ashram, Union Home Secretary G K Pillai had said.

“It should be noted that Osho Ashram, which is around 200 yards from the bakery, was one of the sites surveyed by the Lashkar e Tayiba operative David Headley. The Maharashtra police had been alerted about this on October 12, 2009,” Pillai had said.

January 2007: Imran Bilal of the Lashkar-e-Toiba, was nabbed and interrogated by the Bangalore, Kashmirand Hyderabad police. Bilal, who was sent to Bangalore to carry out strikes at the Infosys campus, told interrogators that Pune was very high on the Lashkar radar and it was planning a major strike on key establishments there.

Following this, a high alert was sounded off in Pune. Bilal had also said that plans were being drawn up to strike in Pune following a major strike in Bangalore.

August 2009: Gujarat police picked up Mohammad Salim, a former employee of a dental college in Pune. Although he was picked up for his suspected role in the Gujarat blasts, his interrogation went on to reveal that he had recruited several youth from Pune to join the terror outfit.

His interrogation made it clear that the Indian Mujahideen was going about recruiting several youth for its Pune module.

Apart from this the Mumbai police also managed to get a lot of information from Mansoor Peerbhoy, chief of the IM media cell following his arrest. He had told his interrogators that a majority of the techies were recruited from Pune and he had targeted several of them who had been laid off.

No intelligence failure: PC
Despite reports that Pune had received many terror alerts prior to the GB blast, Union Home Minister P Chidambaram said that the terrorists hit a ‘soft target’ like the German Bakery, which is frequented by foreigners and Indians alike.

However, he maintained that the ‘hard targets’ like the Osho Ashram and the Chabad House had been surveyed by US Lashker-e-Toiba suspect David Headley during his visit to India and that the area had been ‘in the radar’ of terrorists for some time.

The investigation
Bakery Not terrorists’ first choice Investigations later revealed that the German Bakery was not the first choice of the terrorists and the the IM had first planned on carrying out a strike at the Chabad House and the Osho Ashram.

The first intelligence alert that was received was that terror outfits would target Chabad House and Osho Ashram since there were many foreigners in these places and terror groups would be trying to get international attention.

However, the plans were changed at the last minute, as they were not able to intercept these places. The IB said that the IM was in a hurry to carry out a strike as, over the past year, several of their plans had gone bust.

Local connection
Intelligence officials suspected that terror outfit Indian Mujahideen behind the blast. The IM was planning to carry out a major blast at the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party offices in New Delhi, but they had to cancel their plans after key operative Shahzad alias Pappu was arrested from Azamgarh.

Sources had said that local modules of the IM were instructed to carry out the blast. The blast indicated a local connection, as the person who planted the bomb in the bag had sufficient information about the lay-out of the bakery, according the ATS.

Explosives the same as jaipur blast
Preliminary investigations into the blast, revealed that the improvised explosive device used in the blast was similar to the one used in the Jaipur serial blasts in 2008.

The IED had been placed in a bag and planted at the German Bakery at Koregaon Park in Pune. According to sources, the nature of the IEDs and the manner in which the bombs had been packed were similar in both cases. The explosive devices were made of RDX, ammonium nitrate and metal pieces.

US journo saw blast suspect
Mohsina (name changed), a young freelance reporter working for various newspapers in the United States, including the Washington Post told ex Pune Police Commissioner Satyapal Singh at a crowded press conference that she had called two police helpline numbers to report about an ‘unusual event’ which she witnessed at the German Bakery on February 12, a day before the bomb blast.

Apparently, Mohsina saw a dark, short man of Indian origin at around 2.30 pm on February 12, who spoke with a thick Indian accent, and who inadvertently hit Mohsina with his beige coloured bag.

This suspicious person also asked Mohsina if she knew of any decent guest house in the area where he could find lodgings. Interestingly, Mohsina again ran into the same person the same evening at around 7 pm at German Bakery, with his bag in tow, making her believe that he was still looking for a hotel.

CCTV footage obtained
On February 15, cops said they had obtained CCTV footage of the frontal area of the German Bakery at the time of the blast. Close circuit television of the ‘O’ Hotel captured frontal open area visuals of the bakery during the blast.

On bhatkal’s trail
The Intelligence Bureau informed the Karnataka, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh police to get more clues regarding Riyaz Bhatkal, a key man of the Indian Mujahideen.

Bhatkal slipped out of India and left for Dubai and later moved to Karachi and was hiding there. The police believed that he had come down to India to boost the morale of the IM operatives who were down and out following the various arrests of their cadres.

—Agencies

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