The Uttar Pradesh police team investigating Friday’s serial blasts has said that one of the bombs that was found intact and defused after the attacks contained RDX, and may have been part of the consignment brought into the state by HuJI militant Babu Bhai.The six bombs that exploded in Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad court complexes on November 23, within a space of 15 minutes, all contained ammonium nitrate and were of less intensity. Had the bomb containing nearly 2.5 kg C4-category RDX, planted in the Lucknow court complex, also exploded, the damage would have been severe. To police knowledge, this was the only bomb used in Friday’s attacks that contained the deadly explosive.Babu Bhai, who was arrested by the STF in June this year, is reported to have confessed to smuggling in 80-odd kg of RDX into Uttar Pradesh over a period of 18 months. At the time of his arrest, Babu Bhai was reportedly carrying 9 kg RDX. In raids that followed his arrest, other half a dozen HuJI terrorists were arrested from a number of places in Uttar Pradesh and varying quantities of RDX recovered. Babu, who is also stated to be an ISI agent, is currently lodged in the Lucknow district jail. Recently, the STF arrested three alleged Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorists in Lucknow and recovered 4 kg RDX from them, besides AK-47 guns and live cartridges. The three, who reportedly meant to target Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, were manhandled by lawyers when they appeared in the Lucknow district court. This, in fact, is suspected to have been one of the reasons court complexes were targeted in Friday’s attacks.The bombs which contained ammonium nitrate were found to be similar to the explosives used in the Gorakhpur blast in May this year in which six persons were injured. “Ammonium nitrate, packed with ball bearings, steel pellets, iron pieces etc were used in these blasts and we had gathered similar residues from Gorakhpur also,” said a forensic official.After the Gorakhpur blasts, there had been significant seizures of ammonium nitrate in the state, with the Allahabad police recovering about 50 kg of ammonium nitrate and 1,000 m of magnetic fuse wire. Just before this incident, the railway police of Faizabad had recovered about 10 kg of explosives and 20 kg of ammonium nitrate from a deserted parcel in the waiting room of the Faizabad railway station.
