Bangalore blast: First major lead as CCTV footage reveals ‘man in black’

mangaloretoday.com/Yahoo

Bangalore, Jan 04: Images from a CCTV camera placed at the entrance of a popular restaurant on Bangalore’s Church Street, about 100 metres away from the Coconut Grove restaurant where a bomb blast on the night of December 28 killed a woman, has helped police isolate pictures of a single suspect possibly involved in the blast.

 

A man wearing a black attire has been captured by a CCTV camera placed at the entrance of a restaurant on Church Street. He is seen moving suspiciously in the direction of the Coconut Grove restaurant and returning in a hurried manner a few minutes later. The movement was captured on the private restaurant’s CCTV camera around 20 minutes before the blast occurred.

The images from the restaurant’s CCTV camera, which are of medium quality but better than images from traffic and street cameras, have provided the best possible lead so far on the identity of the suspect involved in the blast, sources said. Enhanced images from the restaurant CCTV camera were shown to policemen from Madhya Pradesh, who identified the images as possibly that of a person accused in some recent blast cases, the sources said.

Bangalore police commissioner M N Reddi had earlier this week acknowledged the availability of CCTV footage near the crime scene, but had said that the police would not make any images public until it is well established that persons caught on cameras were the real suspects.

Since Sunday, police have been chasing various leads in an effort to find the perpetrators of the blast but have little to show for it, apart from establishing the fact that the bomb used at Church Street is identical to bombs that exploded in Chennai, Pune, Roorkee and Patna since October 2013. A team of experts from the NSG’s bomb data centre which visited Bangalore has now reported that the device used in Bangalore was very similar to the device that was used by SIMI or IM operatives for the Patna blasts at a Narendra Modi rally on October 27, 2013.