Uttar Pradesh blasts

23 November 2007

Indian Judiciary was never the target in the history of terrorism in India but on Friday, 23 November 2007, three near-simultaneous explosions went off within minutes of each other in Varanasi, Faizabad and Lucknow in the State of Uttar Pradesh, India.

The first explosion occurred in the Varanasi civil court, which killed nine people and injured 45 others. The second explosion took place within five minutes of the first blast in Faizabad, where three bombs left four people dead and fourteen injured. The third explosion took place in Lucknow, which did not cause any casualties.

Total of 13 people were killed and 60 others injured in the five bombs, which were synchronized to explode shortly after 1315 hrs (Indian Standard Time).All the bombs exploded inside the court complexes, but not inside courtrooms. Overall, five bombs exploded, while one bomb each was recovered from Faizabad and Lucknow later.

Preliminary investigations were conducted and some sketches of the suspects were released. used in the 11 May 2007 attack in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, as well as the 25 August 2007 blasts in Hyderabad. The blasts were triggered by locally-made quartz alarm clocks while the cycles used for planting the bombs were also locally bought on Wednesday, 21 November 2007. 

Although the Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) used in the attacks do not seem to be highly sophisticated, the synchronization of the blasts across three cities at about the same time indicates a certain level of sophistication in the planning and implementation of the attacks. A parallel may be drawn here with the 400 synchronized bombings in Bangladesh in August 2005 by the Jaamiat’ul Mujahideen (JuM) which also targeted lawyers and courthouses in Bangladesh.

According to police reports, the Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad blasts point to the involvement of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) planners and local HuJI operatives. Okasa, the man accused by recently detained JeM militants of planning to conduct a kidnapping of Rahul Gandhi in Lucknow, is still at large and reportedly in touch with Athar Ibrahim, brother of Masood Azhar, who heads the JeM. 

The JeM, which is responsible for the attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001, is considered to be one of the most lethal groups capable of conducting operations against India. Also, security agencies and the Uttar Pradesh police are questioning the role of Mohammed Tuffail Hussaini, Harkatul-Jehadi Islamic (HuJI) militant in connection with the Lucknow serial blasts as his kin have been arrested for questioning. However, in an email which was sent to a private TV channel in India, a little known entity called the ‘Indian Mujahideen’ claimed responsibility for the attack. 

The email was sent on Friday morning, 23 November 2007, from a cyber café in Laxmi Nagar, East Delhi by guru_alhind@yahoo.fr, warning of attacks against lawyers in UP. A second email from gurus_boys2000@yahoo.com was sent as a threat to the Pakistani cricket team asking them to withdraw from the current Test series against India. The email also included a list of future attacks in prominent cities and metropolises in India.

However, the authenticity of the emails is still to be verified. The identity of the perpetrators of the attacks thus remains a point of contestation.

The reason for the blasts seems to be a retaliatory act against lawyers. At present, all thethree civil courts of Lucknow, Faizabad and Varanasi are holding trials of major terrorist attacks in Uttar Pradesh. It was recently reported that lawyers in the Lucknow district court had assaulted the three JeM operatives who were arrested. In many cases of terrorist incidents, lawyers refused to defend the accused. In Faizabad, where the case of the attack on the Ram Janmabhoomi of 2005 is being heard, the court had to appoint an officer to defend the five accused, because no lawyer agreed to do so. Also, in Varanasi, the entire bar council resolved not to fight the case for Waliullah, the prime accused in the 2006 Sankat Mochan terror attack. Indian security analysts believe that the email sent out before the UP blasts maybe the first of a new kind of ‘Islamist’ terrorism in India. The email specified that the Indian Mujahideen group were not foreign mujahideens or affiliated to any organization.

outside India e.g. the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) or Harkatul-jihad-e-Islami (HuJI). The email also mentioned that the attack was an act of retribution by Muslims in India to protest against the pogroms conducted against them in Gujarat in 2002 and in 1992-93 in Mumbai. 

The Indian Mujahideen may not a particular group, but may be referring to Indian Muslims in general. An interesting aspect is the fact that the email denies involvement of the Indian Mujahideen in the Malegaon attack in September 2006, and the Samjhauta Express and Mecca Masjid blasts in 2007. 

Some analysts feel that the language in the email is similar to the language of the literature produced by the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) thus indicating a domestic connection. At a 2000 convention in Mumbai, the SIMI leaders had called on their cadres to participate in ‘jihad’ against India. Thus, two lines of thinking dominate the analysis of the attack.