At least one person was killed when bombs stockpiled inside a club at Katwa in Burdwan district went off bringing down the entire concrete structure, sources said adding a large contingent of police and CID personnel had surrounded the area and the National Investigation Team (NIA) was alerted.
The incident happened in the early hours of Monday, Additional SP Rajnarayan Mukherjee said, “An elderly man who was sitting outside the club died instantly.” Even as panic gripped the entire Sribati area on the outskirts of the sub-divisional town, the NIA was immediately alerted and the Central agency’s senior officers got in touch with the district administration.
Katwa is about 150 km from Kolkata. “There were discussions between the district-level officers and their NIA counterparts,” sources in the police administration said.
However, they refused to divulge any further details about the blast.
“Investigations are on but prima facie it looks like crude bombs which had been stockpiled in the club had gone off accidentally,” a senior official said, wondering in the same breath as to the reasons behind piling up such huge quantity of bombs in a single place particularly because “these are no election times.”
It is a practice of late in Bengal that crude bombs are stockpiled in strategic locations for use during the elections. “The nearest one in sight is the Panchyayat election which is more than a year away so there is no need for the political miscreants to stockpile bombs,” said a local politician and a former MlA requesting anonymity driving home the need for a “thorough investigation.”
“We rushed out of our houses hearing a huge explosion and saw the club building almost flattened,” said a local.
Burdwan district more popularly known as both the Ruhr of Bengal and the State’s ‘rice bowl’ had been witnessing blasts on regular basis in the past a few years.
While a blast killed two persons at Gafulia in Katwa little more than a year ago another one hit the national headlines two years ago when two Jamat-ul-Mujhahideen Bangladesh terrorists were killed at Khagragarh when bombs they were making went off accidentally.
Subsequent investigation by the NIA revealed the nefarious designs of JMB which had set up an elaborate terror network in the districts like Burdwan, Nadia, Birbhum, Malda, Murshidabad bordering Bangladesh.
Apart from carrying out terror strikes in the neighouring country the terror outfit had plans to blow up the NSI Airport in Kolkata and attack 24 other places during the festive season.