MALAPPURAM: A low intensity improvised explosive device (IED) went off in a car parked near the judicial first class magistrate court inside the civil station here on Tuesday . No one was injured in the incident. The investigation officials suspect a terror group named `The Base Movement' is behind the explosion. The explosion occurred around 1 pm near a taxi car hired by district medical officer (homoeopathy), which was parked in front of DMO office near the court complex. The windshield of the vehicle and another car in the parking area suffered damages in the explosion.
Police said the explosive material was placed inside pressure cooker, but there is no confirmation whether a timer device or remote control was used to trigger the blast. Initial finding is that ammonium nitrate was used in the explosive. The bomb squad of police and forensic experts who collected evidence from the spot recovered a box on which `The Base Movement' was written.Police have also recovered a damaged battery , a pen drive and a notice issued by `The Base Movement' from the site.
The notice with a map of India has a warning to the `killers' of
Muhammad Akhlaq who was beaten to death for allegedly eating beef in Dadri in Uttar Pradesh in 2015. The notice says that the killing of Akhlaq has `become a shame in front of the world' and warned the killers to `count your days'. The notice also contained criticism of Indian judiciary . The photograph of the slain
Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is also given at the end of the notice. Police have not divulged the content in the pen drive recovered from the site.
Driver of the vehicle, C Us man, said that an object inside vehicle exploded with a deafening sound. “The car was parked in the area around 9.30am and I went to the medical office along with DMO. We don't know how the miscreants managed to place the explosive device in the car,“ he said.
The district police chief
Debesh Kumar Behra
, visited the spot along with other senior police official. The police suspect that the same group was behind similar explosions at the court complex at Kollam on June 15 and Mysuru on August 1. The claim of `Base Movement' for a blast in Chittoor court complex had led the investigators to probe the role of the same group in Kollam blast.
Sources in the intelligence agencies said that a pattern was emerging from all the explosions. The presence of photo of Osama bin Laden, map of India and warning against atrocities on Muslims were the basic characteristic of the operation of The Base Movement, which the police suspected was the Indian affiliate of Al Qaeda. `The Base Movement' or the Organization of the Base of Jihad in the Indian subcontinent is the outfit suspected to be the offshoot of Al Qaeda in India Subcontinent (AQIS), which has presence in the South Indian states. The cadres of the Al Ummah, which was banned after the Coimbatore blast in 1998, are believed to have regrouped under the new outfit.
Ayman Al Zawahiri
, the present chief of Al Qaeda, has announced the formation of AQIS in 2014.
Meanwhile, the
National Investigation Agency (NIA) officials will visit the blast site and examine material evidences collected from the spot.The agency will coordinate with the state police to investigate the incident.
“The NIA team probing the Mysuru blast will assist and coordinate with Kerala police investigating the one in Malappuram“, said NIA officials.According to officials, the blast at court premises in Malappuram on Tuesday is the fourth low intensity explosion reported in South India this year.
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