The back-to-back country bomb-making accidents in Kannur and Thiruvananthapuram in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections have alerted the police to the possible illegal diversion of low-grade explosives for criminal purposes.
A top official said the current police inspections were based on “all suspected places and suspected persons, based on current intelligence and past incidents” to interdict potential bomb-makers and also shut down secret and unsafe fireworks-making units.
The separate blasts claimed the life of one person in Kannur and injured four others, two of them in Thiruvananthapuram.
Questions about the bomb-makers’ political background, motive, and intended targets remain in the realm of conjecture. However, they have opened the door to intense back and forth between opposing alliances and posed questions about law enforcement’s vigilance during electioneering against stockpiling of weapons and explosives.
Officials privy to the blast scene examinations say the investigators have, prima facie, ruled out the presence of timers or electronic circuitry often used for controlled explosions. Instead, they say, the IEDs that caused the blasts seem to be crude bombs designed to explode on impact.
The police suspect that the devices accidentally exploded when the bomb-makers wound them into compressed balls for easy transport, concealment, and use.
In Kannur, some IEDs recovered from near the blast spot at Panur were packed with nails and metal fragments to increase the amount of shrapnel propelled by the explosion.
Both at Panur and Mannanthala, in Thiruvananthapuram, the bomb-makers appeared to have used low-grade gunpowder possibly sourced from fireworks.
The police say explosives sold to licensed cracker manufacturers and also quarries are vulnerable to diversion for blast-fishing in rivers and backwaters in the State. Bomb-makers can easily access such incendiary material in the black market.
A senior officer says the State police partially rely on the Central government’s mechanism for tracking explosives. This mechanism helps the State law enforcement monitor the movement of explosives from the manufacturer to the stockist to the buyer.
The system primarily pertains to the movement of fertilizer, gunpowder, hydrogen peroxide and relatively rare chemicals such as triacetone triperoxide (TATP) type explosives used in the Easter day bombings in Sri Lanka in 2019.
However, the officer says the monitoring mechanism is a poor substitute for real-time field verifications.
