Tuesday, Dec 31, 2002
Tuesday, Dec 31, 2002 |
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Tamil Nadu
By V.S. Palaniappan
A police team examining the damaged portion of the roof of a town bus parked in a depot in Coimbatore, after a petrol bomb attack in the small hours of Monday. — Photo: K. Ananthan
The petrol bomb was hurled at around 1.30 a.m. by unidentified miscreants, who were spotted on the Avanashi Road flyover. According to eyewitness accounts, a beer bottle, filled with kerosene and sealed with cotton waste, fell on the roof of a town bus and caught fire, causing minor damage. When the attack occurred, 18 buses, a diesel tanker and a service van were parked in the depot. The security staff and technical assistants, who heard the "bang", immediately dumped sand on the roof of the bus and put out the fire. A team led by the Deputy Commissioner of Police (Law and Order), P. Balasubramanian, removed the remnants of the petrol bomb for forensic examination. This was the second attack on a TNSTC depot, the first having occurred in December 2000, when a petrol bomb was hurled at the Ukkadam bus depot. Six persons were arrested in connection with that incident. In the other incident today, the Police Commissioner's office received at about 2 p.m. a phone call stating a live explosive had been planted in front of the Press Club. Bomb detection and disposal squad personnel recovered the explosive and defused it on the Police Recruit School Ground. A black colour bag, removed from the Press Club, contained four gelatin sticks, a detonator, a mechanical timer device, a battery and some wires. The Police Commissioner, Sanjay Arora, told reporters that the caller, who spoke in English with a Malayalam accent, said: "We will rip Coimbatore into two, if the police do not take us seriously. This is just a sample of what we have planned and what we could do." The Commissioner said this incident could be a fallout of Friday's seizure of four cellphones and five SIM cards from Mrs. Maudany, wife of the Kerala-based People's Democratic Party leader, Abdul Nasser Maudany, and PDP supporters. Besides augmenting manpower for deployment, anti-sabotage teams were put on high alert, Mr. Arora said. Special teams were formed for investigation. The Inspector-General, Narinder Pal Singh, said the police suspected links between the petrol bomb attack and the planting of explosives. The IGP and the Commissioner said the miscreants had not targeted the media, but it was their game plan to attract media attention by planting the explosive near the Press Club. Meanwhile, the miscreants had also called up newspaper offices stating a bomb had been planted. A fax message received by newspaper offices from Ernakulam in the name of the Islamic Sevak Sangh (ISS) claimed: "We have done it — if Tamil Nadu Police repeat torturing Abdul Nasir Maudany and his family, we will repeat it". It cited four instances of Tamil Nadu registration vehicles having been attacked in Kerala. The letter contained six lines of blank space with a question mark, leaving to inference the miscreants' future plans. It also had two cuttings of a news item, published in two Malayalam dailies, on Friday's incident at the Coimbatore Central Prison gate.
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