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Nine youths arrested in Kerala for involvement in Coimbatore blasts

The Thrissur police have arrested nine youths in connection with last week's serial bomb blasts at Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu.

According to information received at the state police control room in Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, the arrested youth, who were between the ages of 18 and 21, were produced before a magistrate on Wednesday who remanded them to police custody.

A police team led by Deputy Superintendent of Police Subramonium arrested them on Tuesday night at Kalathode following a tip-off that the youth were hiding in a house there.

All the nine hail from Ukkadam area in Coimbatore, and one of them was Abbas alias Sabu, said to be the brother of Mujibur Rehman, an alleged supplier of bombs and an accused in the Coimbatore bomb blast case.

The others arrested were: Abdul (18), Habibulla (20), Amanulla (18), Abdul Jaffar (18), Muhammed (18), Hakkim (21), Iqbal (19) and Abbas (18).

The police said the youth entered Kerala through Palakkad bordering Coimbatore. The police have intensified patrolling in Thrissur district as part of their efforts to check possible infiltration of suspects from Tamil Nadu.

Meanwhile, in Coimbatore, following an intensive search, the police have recovered a sizeable number of bombs and defused them. Intensive patrolling by 50 mobile police parties were continuing round the clock.

Four columns of army and nine companies of central paramilitary forces had supplemented the state police in bringing the situation under control and restoring normalcy in the trouble-torn city and other parts of the state.

Director General of Police I Ravi Arumugam, briefing newsmen, said the car-bomb that was defused on Wednesday in the textile town was a very powerful and highly sophisticated one and had it exploded, it would have caused a catastrophe.

The bomb disposal experts had successfully removed the front door of the car and back windscreen and drilled a hole on the right side of the back door.

There was a criss-crossing of wires, interconnecting different boxes. The experts, with meticulous planning and trial and error methods were able to figure out the configuration of the bomb, he said.

A surprising feature noticed by the experts was that the driver of the abandoned car had jammed the front door after alighting to prevent others from entering the car, he added.

Asked whether external forces had provided the expertise to make the bomb, Arumugam declined to give a categorical reply saying, "We will come out with more details later."

The police have arrested so far 261 people, some of them were conspirators.

The official also declined to say whether the conspirators had any foreign links, although Chief Minister M Karunanidhi had suspected the involvement of foreign agencies including those in Europe, in the blasts.

Fourteen experts from the Military Engineering Group, Pune, and the National Security Guard, New Delhi, were meanwhile felicitated for successfully defusing the car-bomb which had created a big scare and tension in the city since Saturday last.

The team, led by Major Ivor Goldsmith of the NSG, was felicitatedat a function organised at the district collectorate and presided over by Tamil Nadu Forests Minister N Palanisamy.

The team struggled for three days before defusing the bomb planted in a car abandoned close to the meeting venue where Bharatiya Janata Party president L K Advani was to have addressed a campaign meeting on Saturday last.

The deactivated explosives, kept in seven boxes in the car, were removed to remote Madukkarai for detonation.

In Jalandhar, the Shaheed Parivar fund committee, set up by the Hind Samachar group of newspapers to help victims of terrorist violence in 1983, has decided to give Unit Trust of India bonds worth Rs 15,000 to each of the families of those killed in serial bomb blasts in Coimbatore since Saturday last.

The newspaper's chief editor Vijay Kumar Chopra said the committee has also decided to give Rs 10,000 each to those who suffered more than 50 per cent injuries in the blasts. The bereaved families and the injured would also be provided household articles such as sewing machines, blankets, clothes, utensils, flour, rice and pulses, he added.

The fund, set up in 1983 by then chief editor Romesh Chander, who himself became a victim of terrorists's bullets in May 1984, has so far received donations worth Rs 66.5 million and disbursed over Rs 56.9 billion to 5,308 terrorist victim families in Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Bihar and Delhi.

In Aurangabad, Bharatiya Janata Party president L K Advani demanded that the Tamil Nadu government seek the assistance of army experts to detect bombs following the serial bomb blasts in Coimbatore.

UNI

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