Massive hunt on for Bijnor blast accused

LUCKNOW: Convinced that the accused who got injured in the ‘accidental’ blast on Friday and one of his associates were still holed up in Bijnor itself, the district police launched extensive house to house search on Sunday. Rural areas of of Bijnor would be searched on Monday.
Authorities in Bijnor engaged 46 companies of PAC and para-military forces that was deployed for poll duty, to conduct the massive exercise which however failed to yield any results.The house to house search was launched after it was revealed that apart from the three youths living in a portion of the house where the blast took place, their three associates were putting up in another house situated barely a kilometer away.
Inspector General (IG), ATS, Rajiv Sabbarwal confirmed that five of the suspects had been identified as those who had escaped from Khandwa jail in MP on October 1, 2013. The IG said that investigators got the photographs of the fugitives from Indore police which were shown to the neighbors of the suspects who then identified them as the people living in the room where the blast took place.
Meanwhile ATS sleuths investigating the case have managed to put together the pieces of jigsaw to decipher how the blast took place. Reconstructing the scene of blast with all that was available at the scene, investigators believe that the blast took place while one of the suspects was grinding small lumps of sulphur obtained from removing the tip of an unused matchsticks.
“They were using a ‘belan’ (rolling pin) that housewives use to make rotis. We have recovered two ‘belans’ from the blast scene which have traces of sulphur on them,” said a senior officer of the ATS supervising the probe. “Probably it was due to the pressure from the ‘belan’ that the lumps got crushed and in the process triggered a spark which was enough to burn all the sulphur that they had removed from the matchsticks by then,” he said.
Two cartons full of matchstick bundles containing 10 packets of matchboxes each, were recovered from the room apart from a heap of matchsticks which no longer had their sulphur tip, were also found in a corner of the room. The rest had apparently been reduced to ashes when the fire took place. The investigators were yet to establish if any other explosive was used or not. Investigators are also tight-lipped over the recovery of a metal pipe from the room where the incident took place.
As per forensic experts, sulphur powder mixed with a certain quantity of phosphorus and potassium can make a highly inflammable explosive which, if triggered with a blast, will spreads like crystals of fire all over the place. Such a destruction not only helps to make the impact a more serious one but the fire also helps to do away with the evidences like finger prints etc from the container in which such explosives are kept, they claim.