2014 Chennai train blast mystery solved: It was revenge, say accused

Bengaluru, Mar 15: The blast on the Bengaluru-Guwahati train, the case popularly known as the Chennai train blasts had created panic in the minds of the people.

The mystery about why the train was bombed and who the culprits were remained a mystery for a very long time. To recap in May 2014, two low intensity bombs had gone off on the Bengaluru-Guwahati tri-weekly express train when it stopped at the Chennai railway station.

The case remained unsolved for a long time, but with the arrest of three persons in Odisha who are believed to be SIMI activists, the police claim that the details are emerging clearly now.

The three youth who are being questioned by the Madhya Pradesh ATS have been told that the reason behind the Chennai train blasts was revenge. The three youth are alleged to have told their interrogators that they wanted to avenge the throwing out of 14 Muslim men from the same train in 2012.

In the year 2012, 14 Muslim men were allegedly thrown out of the train. The incident that took place on the same train occurred at the New Jalpaiguri Railway Station, West Bengal in 2012.

The three operatives of the SIMI told the ATS that this incident had hurt them a lot and hence they decided to carry out the blast.

They said that they found that security was lax on the Bengaluru-Chennai route and hence decided to plant the bomb on the train. The bomb took off when it reached the Chennai railway station.

The NIA which is probing this case says that they will look into this angle following the new revelations. The NIA says that they too had found that the same youth were involved in the train blasts. In 2013, five operatives of the SIMI had managed a grand escape from a jail in Khandwa Madhya Pradesh.

After remaining free for almost two years, two of them were killed last year in an encounter at Telangana. The three others were arrested recently in Odisha.

During the questioning the youth are also said to have confessed carrying out the blast near a police station in Pune in July 2014. They said that this was carried to avenge the police killing of a SIMI operative at Aurangabad in Maharashtra in the year 2012. The Pune ATS had killed one SIMI operative in the 2012 encounter.

OneIndia News