ON July 11, when explosions ripped apart the seven commuter trains during evening rush hour, Mumbai earned the unwanted distinction of being the only city in the world to be scarred twice by serial blasts. A month on, even as Mumbai Crime Branch officers who cracked the 1993 serial blasts case gear up for the verdict of the special TADA court, the pressure is increasing for the Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) investigating the Terrible Tuesday attacks.

Under fire from the Centre for its slow progress in the case, the state ATS—after detaining more than 500 people in farcical combing operations that had the public and the security experts up in arms— has all of eight arrests to show so far. Yet none of these eight arrests inspire confidence that the probe is on the right track, with the investigators themselves hard pressed to link the accused with the train blasts.

All eight “played roles in a large conspiracy,” says the ATS. Yet three weeks after the first triumphant “breakthrough” arrest, the remand applications of the accused say nothing about their roles, interlinks or associations with any particular outfit.

“The explosions were carried out in such a well-planned manner that there was no evidence at the blast sites to directly link the arrested accused with the blasts,” admits Joint Commissioner of Police, ATS, Krish Pal Raghuvanshi.

All in the Mind

IN the early days, there was little to show that investigations of Serial Blasts II would not quite go the way of Blasts Probe I. Ten days after the terror attack, the ATS announced its first arrests. Kamal Ahmed Ansari and Khalid Aziz Ronak Sheikh were picked up from Basupatti village in Bihar. Ansari’s brother-in-law Mumtaz Ahmed Choudhary was arrested the same day from Thurbe in Navi Mumbai.

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