Serial blasts revisit K'taka after eight years

Bangalore, Jul 25 (UNI) Today's serial low-intensity bomb blasts, that sent shockwaves across the city, is the second such incident since 2000 in Karnataka.

The 2000 incident, however, was triggered along with blasts that occurred across Andhra Pradesh and Goa, when several churches were targetted with similar low intensity explosives.

In July, 2000, bombs went off near churches at Jagajivannagar in the city, Yadagir in Gulbarga district, Goa and Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh.

Police had arrested members of Hyderabad-based radical Deendar Group in connection with the incident and the trial is still on. The Centre had banned the organisation following the incident.

The Deendar plot was cracked when the crude bombs that they were carrying in a car accidentally went off, killing two of them. They were on the way to plant bombs in another church in Bangalore.

Two of them, however, managed to escape.

The city witnessed another major terrorist attack, when the Lashkar-e-Toiba operatives opened fire at a group of scientists at the Indian Institute of Sciences in December, 2005, killing a Delhi-based scientist and injuring five others.

Since January this year, the police had arrested over a dozen people, suspected to be members of the banned SIMI and LeT outfits.

A chance arrest of two LeT suspects while they were riding on a motorcycle, stolen from Goa in Honnali town in Davangere district, had led to the arrests of many others.

UNI MV RS SB NS2010