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The Home Minister, Mr P. Chidambaram, said on Thursday that there was no intelligence inputs either from the Central or State agencies on Wednesday's blasts in Mumbai that killed 18 and injured more than 100 people.
However, he said that this cannot be seen as a failure on the part of the intelligence agencies. The Maharashtra police had foiled several potential terrorists attacks after the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai in 2008.
Attack on financial markets?
Addressing a press conference here on Thursday morning, he said the blasts cannot be interpreted as an attack on the country's financial markets. The sites could have been chosen because of the density of population there, he said. “It cannot be seen as an attack on the markets or the commercial capital of the country,” the Minister said.
One of the triple blasts that rocked Mumbai was at Zaveri Bazaar, the famous gem and jewellery market in Mumbai.
Mr Chidambaram, who visited the blast sites on Wednesday night, said the blast at Dadar was of low-intensity, while those at Opera House and Zaveri Bazaar were moderate to high intensity. He said forensic evidence has been collected and are being examined by teams from the Central Forensic Science Laboratory in New Delhi and Pune.
Mr Chidambaram refused to speculate on who is responsible for the blasts and said every terrorist group hostile to India will be on the radar. “We do not want to rule out any angle,” he said.
Every city ‘vulnerable'
Responding to a question on repeated terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the Home Minister said every city in the country is vulnerable. “We live in the most troubled neighbourhood in the world. Pakistan-Afghanistan is the epicentre of terror. Every part of India is vulnerable,” he said.
He said the capacity of Maharashtra police has been substantially augmented post 26/11 and, as a result, they have been successful in foiling or neutralising a number of threats. “It is unfortunate that the two terror attacks after 26/11 have both happened in Maharashtra,” he said. The earlier one was in Pune in February 2010.
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