Police suspect rivalry angle in Agra hospital blast,neighbourhood differs

Set up in 1998,the nursing home is owned jointly by Kunwar Udaibir Singh and Dr Manavendra Sharma. While Singh owns several properties in Agra and is an IIT-Kharagpur graduate,Sharma is a well-known orthopaedic surgeon from Safdarjung Hospital in Delhi.

It was a crude bomb welded with iron. There was no timer and it was ignited with the help of heating. Three batteries have also been found. There have been several incidents in the state in the past where crude bombs have been used to settle personal scores, said Brij Lal,Special DGP (Law & Order),Uttar Pradesh.

He added that they were investigating the blast from all angles,not ruling out terror. No arrest has been made so far.

A team of the National Investigation Agency (NIA),the UP ATS,officials of the Intelligence Bureau and the National Security Guard all visited the explosion site.

An NIA team visited in the morning and collected samples from the hospital. We are culling out records to see if the hospital had recently sacked any employee or had an argument with any disgruntled staff. The mobile phone records of the hospital owners are being checked, said Avdesh Kumar,SHO,Hari Parbat police station.

An Uttar Pradesh police officer said they had found potassium chlorate,sulphur and charcoal in the explosive device,after preliminary examination. Such materials are generally used for manufacturing firecrackers.

Owner Udaibir Singh,who was injured in the attack,denied a rivalry angle. If the police close their mind and investigate it from a rivalry angle then you can think what will happen to the investigations. I never had rivalry with anyone. Targeting a hospital is a sick thing to do, said the 75-year-old.

He said he was just taking a stroll in the reception area and was getting a door repaired when the bomb went off. There was smoke everywhere. I fell down as everyone started running, said Singh.

His partner Sharma agreed with Singh. I have known Singhji for the past many years but we never had any problem with each other. Had there been a personal rivalry angle they would have targeted us with a gun not a bomb, said Sharma,who was operating on a patient when the explosion occurred.

While the three-storey hospital has four CCTVs,these have been non-functional for six months. We sent them for repair but they were never re-installed, said Sharma,putting the damage caused to them by the blast at Rs 5-6 lakh.

Geetam Singh,a Class IV employee who had come to meet his maternal uncle from Aligarh,was one of the seven injured. I was watching television at the reception counter and saw a cardboard box lying below the seat next to the one I was sitting on. I thought it was some medicine box. It was lying there for more than an hour and it suddenly exploded. The entire area was filled with black smoke for 10 minutes and I was gasping for breath. Suddenly all the windowpanes broke due to the impact,even the ones in the backyard shattered. My face has been badly burnt, said Geetam Singh.

The other family members who had come to see his uncle,admitted following a paralytic attack,had gone out to the market and thus escaped the blast.

Barring a few patients remaining in the ICU,all have been shifted to nearby hospitals now.

The shopkeepers in the area,where Singhs family owns 12 shops,also vouch that he never had a quarrel with anyone and was well-respected. Everyone respects the family and they own half the market here besides several acres of land elsewhere in Agra, said a chemist shop owner.

Properties owned by Singh,known to the residents as babaji,dot an entire lane near Jai Hospital,which is located on a Kanpur-Agra highway bypass road. Only Jai Hospital named after Singhs father is a partnership venture,the others are owned by his elder son.

My father donated 18 acres of land recently to construct two colleges in nearby Tundla village,our ancestral place, said Singhs younger son Sanjeev,a software engineer at HCL Technologies in Noida.

The Uttar Pradesh police has announced a reward of Rs 1 lakh to anyone giving concrete information on the people behind the blast.