After days of sustained interrogation, the militants have yielded the sketchiest ideas of their operations in the State, said police sources. And there has been no mention of their local contacts.

While Police Commissioner J Mahapatra, too, admitted at a press briefing that ``pin-pointing the local elements in the case has become difficult'', since the news had been leaked to the Press prematurely, there is little doubt that the handling of the case left much to be desired.

For one, the police did not initially inform any agency of the arrests, because ``a leak could cause the local contacts to slip off'', but even after three days of interrogation ``without anybody's assistance'', they failed to get an inkling about their local sympathisers.

Police officials, too, were sceptical about the case. ``Mysteries that of the utmost importance to Gujarat are yet to be solved. First, what were the militants doing in Vadodara? Couldn't they have built up local contacts during a week-long stay here? Did the Babbar Khalsa come here to strike with just a foreign-made pistol and two country-made revolvers?'', questioned an officer.

With officials yet to declare the militants' mission, local papers, meanwhile, are having a field day guessing at ``VVIP killings'' and ``human bomb for K P S Gill''.

While Mahapatra said the motive would be made public after the Amritsar police took charge of the trio following the lapse of their local remand on June 22, officials admitted there wasn't much to announce, since the police probe into the local angle of the militant network hadn't gone off too well.The Vadodara police's failure showed up sharply after the Punjab police team came down and, after interrogation, linked them to scores of subversive acts in the Punjab and one of them to a Cuttack murder.

Mahapatra defended his force by saying, ``Most of the time was consumed in verifying the militants' antecedents. We weren't sure of their affiliation and it was only after that that we got down to interrogation. And by that time, the news had leaked out.''

Asked why the police hadn't been able to learn anything on the militants' local contacts, Mahapatra said, ``They are hardcore, trained militants who have been taught not to divulge details easily.'' However, he was optimistic that they'd soon be able to trace ``some local contacts''. In this scenario, the militant-arrest has thus become a burden rather than an asset for the Vadodara police. According to Supreme Court guidelines, the accused have to be taken to hospital daily for medical examinations. ``This has only increased our workload'', complained an officer. The police's decision to seek a 10-day remand is also being widely ridiculed, given their failure to extract any information during three days of interrogation. But Mahapatra said it was not necessary for the police to detain the militants for the entire remand period. ``The transfer warrant can come into play before that'', he added.