Terrorists in Bangalore?
Catching up on the backlog of feeds, some discouraging news from Bangalore:
Last Thursday’s Times of India:
An armed assailant killed a retired IIT Delhi professor and injured four others in a daring assault on delegates of an international conference at the premier Indian Institute of Science (IISc) on Wednesday evening.
The unidentified attacker — police aren’t sure whether more than one person was involved in the strike — fired indiscriminately through his AK-47 rifle from the parking lot at delegates coming out of the auditorium after the second day’s deliberations ended.
One person was killed, two other attendees were shot, and a hand grenade (which misfired) was found in the driveway .
This doesn’t appear to have been a large or politically interesting conference. MC Puri, the retired professor who was killed in the attack, was one of 36 attendees at an operations research symposium.
To put this in context, if Bangalore is the Silicon Valley of India, this would have been sort of like going to an information theory conference at Stanford or a Palo Alto hotel and ending up under attack by guns and hand grenades. It’s not something that we worry about here today, and it hasn’t been something that people have worried about there much up to this point.
In an Times of India update today:
Central security agencies have established links between the mastermind of the attack on Indian Institute of Sciences in Bangalore and Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, sources said.
Three persons were detained–two in Bangalore and one in Hyderabad–in connection with the attack on the evening of December 28 and security agencies have found evidence of their links with Al Hadees group based in Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia, the sources said.
I wouldn’t make too much of an international or domestic terrorism angle yet, as the situation is evolving, but it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on as there is clearly potential for a lot of disruption.
See also:
- It can happen to us (Bangalore Times)
- Bangalore Boom, Traffic Congestion
- Terrorists thinking about Bangalore IT companies
January 2nd, 2006 at 12:37 am
The choice of location is still baffling. As you have noted, these sort of conferences are a routine in this auditorium. If their intent was to cause widespread damage(i dont want them to obviously), there were several other potential sites.
There seems to be some progress in the investigation and it will be interesting to see what emerges. The city is functioning normally but with a heightened sense of security.