BANGALORE:
The fear is real: Bangalore has turned into a soft target for terrorists. Terror
raised its head in the city in 1991 after former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi's
killers were gunned down. Then came a nine-year silence, which was broken in
2000, after which the city has seen regular terror
attacks.
Bangalore has played
many roles - hideout, sleeper cell and target - and it has witnessed the
changing face of terror.
The
peaceful city had its first brush with terror in the late 1980s when an LTTE man
escaped from police custody on M G Road. The first bullets were fired against
extremists in August 1991 to kill the assassins of Rajiv
Gandhi.
The first blast took
place on July 9, 2000, at St Peter and Paul's Church at JJ Nagar. The same day,
the van in which terrorists were travelling exploded, killing two of them.
In September 2002, five
terrorists from Tamil Nadu were gunned down in the city. In November 2002, a
dozen LTTE militants were arrested and a huge cache of arms and ammunitions were
seized.
Three years later, in
December 2005, terrorists struck at the prestigious Indian Institute of Science
and killed a former Delhi university professor M C Puri. While investigating
this case, police stumbled upon the LeT network spread across the
state.
LeT south India
operations chief Abdul Rehman, along with seven LeT militants, was arrested in
2006, revealing plans for large scale terror attacks across the state. The trail
of arrests continued and in January 2007, Imran alias Bilal (32), a terrorist
from Jammu and Kashmir, was arrested from
Bellary.
However, it took
two-and-a-half years for Bangalore city police to track down the IISc attacker.
The case was cracked a few months ago when the Uttar Pradesh police arrested a
group of terrorists, who admitted to having carried out the attack. In 2006, a
shocking trend came to the fore. Educated professionals surfaced in the terror
network.
It revealed the
changing face of terror and the magnitude of their plans, which ranged from
train bombings to terror attacks on foreign soil. Next, the Ahmed brothers from
Bangalore - Sabeel Ahmed, a doctor, and Kafeel Ahmed, a PhD scholar in
aeronautical engineering - were arrested by British police in connection with
the attack on Glasgow
Airport
in UK in June-July 2007. Kafeel had prepared the blueprint for the attack in
Bangalore.
In January 2008,
the police stumbled upon a network of SIMI and LeT activists.One of the suspects
was an LeT man trained in Pakistan, while the others were students. Till date,
they have arrested a dozen terror suspects from Karnataka, Kerala, UP and MP.