Delhi,September 7

One more succumbed to injuries the next day 8212; several hours after this report was filed.

The blast dug a four-foot-deep crater near the reception counter where lawyers,litigants,their family,had lined up for entry passes before the main security checkpoint.

This blast comes less than four months after a low-intensity bomb went off in the courts parking lot near Gate Number 7.

Police said the briefcase containing the explosives,a mix of ammonium nitrate and PETN Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate,was abandoned by an unidentified suspect near the first counter there are two other counters and is believed to have exploded soon,at 10.12 am. No detonators have been found at the site yet.

The huge explosion took place all of a sudden and there were bodies all around. I ducked and when I got up,I found severed limbs and saw blood spattered around. It resembled a shamshaan ghat crematorium, said Brijmohan Sharma who had come to the court to get some documents certified.

Nothing has remained of the briefcase,only a thick aluminium wire that holds it is intact,said Dharmendra Kumar,Special Commissioner of Police.

Three hours after the blast,at 1.13 pm,TV channels received an e-mail from harkatuljihadi2011gmail.com claiming responsibility by the Harkat-ul-Jihadi. The email,with grammatical errors,said: We owe the responsibility of todays blast at high court delhi8230;our demand is that Afzal Gurus death sentence should be repealede immediately else we would target major high courts amp; THE SUPREME COURT OF INDIA..

A request for help has been sent to Google headquarters in the US and so far,investigators have found that the email ID was created this morning at 7.30 and set to be auto-deleted a week later on September 14.

Interestingly,the country of residence chosen by the author while creating the account is Pakistan. However,sources were quick to caution that this could be a smokescreen and did not discount the possibility of proxy servers being used.

As of now,the National Investigation Agency is awaiting the final report from Google before drawing any firm conclusions. We are in the process to locate the Internet Protocol address IP. This needs to be verified and we have also sought the help of Google, said a top NIA official.

Soon after a 20-member NIA team took over the case,its Director General S C Sinha said,We are seriously looking into the claim of HuJI which took responsibility for the blast. The debris collected from the site has been sent to CFSL Delhi while a team from the Gandhinagar CFSL,accompanied by NIA team,has also been stationed at the spot.

The agency is also exploring possible links between todays blast,the one at the parking lot on May 25 and the Mumbai July 13 blasts coincidentally,all on a Wednesday.