Intelligence officers say even the selection of such communally-sensitive targets points to a Lashkar-e-Toiba hand.

According to investigators, today’s attackers were from Pakistan and had come across the border from Jammu & Kashmir. The arms and explosives were brought in the same way and were delivered to them in Nagpur.

For the Akshardham strike too, the militants, who police said were Pakistanis, had arrived empty-handed in Ahmedabad. The arms were delivered to them a day before they carried out the attack.

In both cases, the militants were in their early twenties.

Said a senior police officer from Jammu & Kashmir: “It was only after we gunned down Manzoor Zahid Chaudhary, a top LeT commander, in a joint operation with the BSF, some five months after the Akshardham attack that the involvement of Kashmiri operatives was revealed. I won’t be surprised if we crack the Nagpur case from here.”

He said that data retrieved from Chaudhary’s laptop led to the arrest of Laskhar operatives Chand Khan and Yasin Bhatt, about a year after the Akshardham attack.

“It was in a similar manner that the Varanasi blasts case was cracked,” he said. Investigations by the Nagpur police and the Maharashtra anti-terrorist squad (ATS) reveals that the men who attacked the RSS headquarters had arrived from north India. Among the articles recovered from them was a pair of slippers with a tag saying “Bharat Chappal Bhandar, Patna.”

The store is on a roundabout near the Dak Bungalow in Patna, and its owner told The Indian Express he usually sets up shop by renting an open plot. It sells cheap footwear.

Investigators in Gujarat, too, had found that the Akshardham attackers had bought supplies in north India.

After Akshardham, it took Gujarat police a year to zero in on the local contacts who had provided logistic support to the attackers.

In today’s incident, Nagpur police and ATS are clueless about those who provided local support.

“It is not possible to carry out such attacks without local support. However, we are still to identify who provided it,” said a senior ATS officer.