How Bengaluru's FSL helped crack the 7/11 Mumbai blasts case

New Delhi, Oct 2: The cracking of the 7/11 Mumbai serial blasts case was probably one of the toughest. There were unseen faces and a mastermind in Pakistan which made the job of the investigators tougher.

The probe agency was shooting in the dark for sometime and it was hard to pinpoint who was behind this ghastly act. One lead that came by was when two persons were distributing sweets following the blast.

This is where the investigations began. However to get further information from hardened criminals was an extremely difficult job and this is when the probe team headed by K P S Raghuvanshi landed up in Bengaluru for assistance from the Forensic Sciences Laboratory.

Picking up the first lead:
The accused persons were brought down to Bengaluru's FSL where they were subjected to various scientific tests. Conducting the tests on them was extremely difficult as two of the accused were masters at dodging investigation. Two accused had even trained to beat a polygraph test when they were training in Pakistan.

The first lead that the investigators got due to the tests was the organization that planned this blast. There were several doubts as to who had done it, but during the tests the names of Azam Cheema and others cropped up. This led to the probe agency to discover that it was the Lashkar-e-Tayiba which was behind the attack.

Raghuvanshi who had come to Bengaluru with the accused persons at that time says that it was a very difficult probe. The leads were not coming by easily and for sometime it appeared to be a dead case. However once the first leads began coming out, the rest of the probe followed.

The training module:
During the scientific tests, the investigators had to pose various questions to the accused.

Some of them were professionals at dodging all questions posed to them, The same questions had to be asked in different ways before more leads emerged out of the case.
During the tests, the accused spoke about how some of them had gone to Pakistan to train.

Then they began to reveal the source of the explosives and how they were prepared in the houses of the accused persons. Further they also spoke about how some of them had conducted a reconnaissance of the trains that were bombed on that fateful day.

Armed with the results of the scientific tests, the investigating team returned to Mumbai where the probe continued further. In any investigation the first leads are very important and this was possible thanks to the scientific tests conducted at the FSL in Bengaluru.

OneIndia News