NEW DELHI, July 18, 2013: The National Investigation Agency has almost settled on the Indian Mujahideen (IM) as the terror outfit responsible for the serial explosions at Bodh Gaya earlier this month. 

"Going by the modus operandi, nature of explosives and eyewitness statements, the involvement of Naxalites, Hindu terror outfits or even disgruntled elements within the temple management can be safely ruled out. It is now almost certain that the IM or a local outfit owing allegiance to it carried out the multiple blasts," said an officer associated with the probe. 

"While Naxalites are not known to plant small bombs in multiple places and would rather carry out a single big blast for maximum impact, Hindu terror outfits have limited their attacks to only Muslim targets, and the leads that we have offer no clue that they deviated from the pattern in this instance," said the officer. 

As for the suspicion about the blasts being a fallout of the feud among rival groups of Buddhist monks, the officer said: "Differences within temple management authorities are hardly unusual but they have not been so intense as to have led them to set off explosions inside a temple complex that they all revere." 

He also said that the modus operandi points to the involvement of someone with sufficient bomb-making know how: a skill that the Buddhist monks are not known to possess. 

Elaborating as to why the agency suspects the hand of a local offshoot of the IM, the officer disclosed that one of the suspects who is captured in the CCTV footage and may have planted four of the devices, had interacted with people at the blast site in local Magadhi dialect. 

But what gave away the suspect, whose sketches were released by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Tuesday, was his non-conventional parikrama of the Buddha statue in the temple complex. Sources said he was seen by witnesses taking an anti-clockwise parikrama of the statue whereas the parikrama is done in a clockwise direction. 

The suspect wore a Buddhist religious robe and thus his lack of knowledge of established rituals aroused suspicion among devotees present in the temple in the small hours of July 7. However, no one questioned him as he seemed to keep to himself. 

It has also emerged that the suspected bomber wanted to blow up the main Buddha statue inside the Mahabodhi temple. Scrutiny of CCTV footages and eye-witness accounts have revealed that the man spent at least 10 minutes around the main temple and tried several times to enter it. "However, the prayers inside the main temple had already started and it seems the bomber did not find a chance to go inside and plant the bomb," the officer said. 

Witnesses also saw the man roam the giant 80-feet Buddha statue where two bombs were planted but only one exploded. "He was seen lifting the table cloth and looking under the table near the statue. It was exactly the place where one of the bombs was planted," said the officer. 

IM is known to have a strong presence in Bihar, with the Delhi Police having busted its Darbhanga module in December 2011. With intelligence inputs prior to the blasts warning of strikes at Buddhist shrines by radicals seeking to avenge attacks on Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, the investigators are not ruling out these "radicals" being linked to IM. 

According to investigators, the Bodh Gaya blasts probe, unlike the February 21 Hyderabad bombings, is not "blind". "There are eyewitness accounts, CCTV footage recording the movement of the suspect bomber at Mahabodhi temple, and unexploded bombs with intact components like clocks and cylinders that can be traced ... we are following some concrete leads and hope for a breakthrough in due course," he told TOI. 

The IM has emerged as the prime suspect given the planning and modus operandi of the bombers. The investigators believe that "meticulous homework" had gone into the blasts and that one single bomber - seen on CCTV footage released by the NIA on Tuesday - planted all the four bombs at the Mahabodhi temple, while others members of the module waited outside the temple complex or planted bombs at the other sites. The bomber, they feel, knew the placement of the CCTV cameras inside the temple and took care not to get caught looking at the camera, besides choosing a time when it was still dark and the footage would be unclear. 

Be it walking confidently, dressed as a monk, with bombs in a backpack and leaving the site without arousing any suspicion, the bomb planting had a definite IM signature. Not only this, the bombers possibly took care to procure the cylinders from the local retailers one or two at a time, rather than buying them in one go as that would have been easier to trace.

Source: The Times of India, DT. July 18, 2013.