Delhi Police’s investigations into the improvised explosive device (IED) recovered from the Ghazipur flower market on Friday have revealed that it was part of a 24-bomb consignment sent from across the border either through land or via a sea route by the Pakistani 'deep state' to local terrorists. Other devices, recently recovered in Jammu and Kashmir, and Punjab are believed to be part of the same consignment and it is also believed that some devices may have been smuggled into Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh, the Hindustan Times said.

According to top Delhi Police investigators, the Ghazipur device, discovered last week in a crowded wholesale market in East Delhi, was a tiffin bomb with three kilograms of RDX as the core charge and ammonium nitrate as a secondary charge. The device was packed in a steel tiffin with nails and ball bearings and could be detonated remotely.

These IEDs were smuggled from across the border to existing sleeper modules in India as well as to some criminal gangs. A terror module busted by Delhi Police in September 2021 with arrests in Mumbai, Lucknow, Allahabad, and Delhi itself has been linked with this IED recovery. While the Delhi Police and security agencies are trying to recover other IEDs from the consignment, a number of these IEDs have also made their way into Gujarat through the sea route and in Uttar Pradesh through the land route. “It appears that radicalized elements in India are being tasked from across the borders to plant devices at pre-fixed targets or use local criminal elements to do the job; a nationwide alert has been issued so that a terror strike is averted,” Hindustan Times quoted a senior security official who asked not to be named.

In the first decade of this millennium, Pakistani 'deep state' initiated what later came to be known as the "Karachi Project" where young men in India were radicalized by Pakistan trained religious fundamentalists to make and detonate ammonium nitrate bombs in India to show that the country was under threat from home grown terrorism and not cross-border terrorism. By 2010, more than 500 civilians in India had died on account of bomb attacks in Maharashtra, Delhi, Punjab, UP and Bihar, the paper said.

(SAM)