Samrala Chowk blast: One more dead, toll rises to 4

The death toll in the Saturday Samarala Chowk blast has risen to four, with another victim, Chottu Ram, succumbing to injuries on Sunday.

"While the forensic teams which searched the yard on Saturday are yet to give their report, prima facie they have ruled out presence of any IED kind of explosive in which splinters tend to fly around. Thus, the nature of explosive material is still to be seen," said DCP Gurpreet Singh Toor.

Asked how an explosive could reach a yard like this, DCP Toor said, "This is a huge question mark for us too, and we are conducting investigations into this very angle. The owner of the scrap yard has told us that he went around from door to door, collecting scrap and a majority of this scrap came from the cycle shops nearby. Now how did an explosive enter into a cycle shop and then this yard or came directly to this yard?"

Scrap dumped by the Army has been coming to places like Mandi Gobind Garh that have huge steel furnaces. However, this kind of scrap is not collected from door to door and instead comes from nations like Iran or Afghanistan.

Sources said it was Chottu who had been hammering a shell-like object which then exploded. One of the injured in this accident has told the police that Chottu was trying to open the top of the shell to separate the brass and when he failed, he simply threw the shell into the scrap which later burst.

"The forensic team has asked us to send some remains of the blast like parts of the body or objects where these splinters are embedded so that they could study the material more closely," added the DCP.

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