Police suspect local support in Mumbai blasts

Mumbai: The twelve teams of investigators probing the triple blasts which rocked Mumbai on Wednesday evening have reached two clear conclusions and one likely setback. The ownership of the scooter used in Zaveri Bazaar was established and the identification of a dead body with wires jutting out eliminated the suicide bomber theory, but, a shift in the pattern used by homegrown terror modules post blasts is a fresh worry. No mails from any terror outfit have claimed responsibility for the attacks and no pattern from the past has been found yet when it came to the technical evaluation of thousands of post-blast calls made through cell sites close to blast sites.

Union Home Secretary R K Singh said, "We have identified the scooter used in which one of the bombs were planted."

Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithiviraj Chavan said that from evidence collected it seemed as if the attack was from a small terror group.

Two suspects arrested by Mumbai police a few days back for Arms Acts Violations were questioned on Friday.

"This case was a fairly low level operation… With easily available raw material… A very small group… Not even a module could have put them together," said Chavan.

Chavan's point is being seen as an indicator that the terror groups used local support to conduct the last mile of the operation. The police now believes a safe house close to the blast locations was used as the assembly point and intense questioning around these areas has begun certain.

Sources also said the CCTV footage from Dadar and Opera House has thrown up some leads as well.

This conflicting progress in the probe so far has meant that a nationwide pressure operation on known Indian Mujahideen suspects has begun. Two suspects arrested by Mumbai police a couple of weeks ago from Mankhurd for Arms Acts Violations were questioned on Friday.

Investigation teams left for Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. The Delhi and Gujarat police teams are in the process of reaching Mumbai to collate details on similar unsolved explosions in Delhi and Gujarat.

Despite all the denials, the most obvious indicator of the Indian Mujahideen angle came from Ranchi, where the National Investigation Agency (NIA) agents raided a house and picked up a man identified as Manzar Imam alleged to be an associate of one of the suspects called Danish who was arrested by Gujarat police in June.

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