Suspicious letter creates panic at Nagpur police commissionerate

Nagpur, May 31 (UNI) Panic gripped office of the Commissioner of Police here for a while today after receipt of a mail that was mistaken to be a letter bomb.

Later it was found that the paper was coated with an unknown material.

The letter has been sent for chemical analysis, Police Commissioner S P S Yadav told UNI. Panic striked when a staff member raised an alarm after he opened an envelope and found the paper inside coated with some material and no content visible.

Staff from the Bomb Detection and Disposal Squad (BDDS) of the city police, which was summoned to the spot, scraped the material off and found it contained no explosive material, he said.

''The letter did not have any explosive mechanism, either. It was not a letter bomb,'' Mr Yadav said, adding that the scraping revealed the writing.

The letter was handwritten in Hindi, and claimed that several consignments of gelatine, a kind of explosive, was intended to be brought into the city by a person identified only as ''Rahul'', the police commissioner said.

The letter claimed that the coating on the paper was a ''sample'' of the first consignment that was being brought in, Mr Yadav said, adding that ''Rahul'' had been described as a person who is 5 feet 3 inches tall.

The letter, which appeared to have been written on a page torn off from a diary, also claimed that ''Rahul'' had been involved in the conspiracy behind the abortive attack on the headquarters of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) here on June 1 last, and dared the police to catch him, the top cop said.

Mr Yadav said the letter would be sent to an expert for comparing the handwriting in it with those of some suspects. The letter was posted at Hanuman Nagar Post Office here on May 29 and arrived at the General Post Office (GPO) the next day, he said.

Significantly, the letter arrived at the police commissionerate on the eve of the first anniversary of the abortive bid on the RSS headquarters here. It was on June 1, 2006, that the police thwarted a bid by three armed men, suspected to be terrorists, to storm the RSS headquarters in the early hours of the morning. The police had shot down the three men, who had come in a white car, as they tried to break through the barricade erected as part of the security blanket around the building.

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