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The maimed, bleeding victims had been being rushed to hospitals and Mr. Advani was escorted to security. Amid the strain within the air, consideration shifted parallelly to East Lokmanya Road, R.S. Puram, a crowded residential locality within the metropolis, the place a automobile was discovered deserted.
LK. Advani consoles a bereaved member of the family after the Coimbatore serial blasts in February 1998 | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives
Explosive-laden automobile
All 4 doorways of the automobile had been locked. Sun management movies on the home windows and rear wind-shield blocked the within view. The policemen peered by way of the entrance wind-shield and seen a number of bike side-boxes stacked inside. It didn’t take lengthy to conclude they had been laden with explosives. The police realised it could be dangerous to aim to open the automobile. They didn’t desire a 14th explosion on February 14, to tear aside and snuff out extra lives in Coimbatore.
The clock was ticking. Bomb disposal specialists swiftly moved in. Residents of the locality had been all moved out. In a coordinated operation, the Army, the CRPF, the RAF and the police cordoned off the bomb zone.
A sandbag buffer was constructed across the automobile to soak up the impression of doubtless explosion. Traffic was blocked in its neighborhood. Fire tenders had been positioned at vantage factors. The solely individuals round had been personnel in khaki and army fatigues. And after all, journalists and photographers at a secure distance.
Joint mission
Removing the explosive bins proved a frightening process. Experts from the National Security Guards (NSG), Army’s Bombay Engineering Group (BEG), Pune, and the Tamil Nadu Commando School (TNCS) joined the operation. Hours handed by. Inspector General of Police (Operations) Jagan M. Seshadri was coordinating the high-risk mission. He held “a number of rounds of crisis-management discussions” with Major Ivor Goldsmith of the NSG, Captain Sanjay Chawla of the BEG and officers of the TNCS, attempting to hold out the nerve-wracking mission with precision.
The first main breakthrough got here on February 18. Commandos of the NSG and the BEG opened the doorways, bonnet and the boot of the automobile. They discovered a lethal payload of gelatin explosives. The bomb squad specialists disconnected the automobile battery earlier than severing the maze of inter-connecting wires underneath the bonnet. A day earlier, specialists had managed to snap one of many wires resulting in the six side-boxes.
Remote-controlled elimination
“As the commandos gingerly extracted the bombs, utilizing a distant pulley system, and stacked them onto a truck (wherein they had been later taken to the Madukkarai Shooting Range and detonated), a giant cheer went up; the newspersons, policemen and fire-fighters who had been eyewitnesses to the drama rushed to greet the commandos,” reported the Frontline, a sister publication of The Hindu, in its fortnightly subject of March 7, 1998.
The bomb squad eliminated the six side-boxes of explosives every weighting 10 kg. “In a fastidiously coordinated operation, the place one defective transfer may have spelt catastrophe, the specialists used remote-controlled gear to take away the explosives from the automobile wherein they’d been fastened,” stated The Hindu dated February 19, 1998.
Each of those bins was then loaded on to a truck laden with sandbags and shifted to the Madukkarai Shooting Range, about 13 kms from Lokmanya Road. The truck was escorted by Fire Service and police automobiles. “It took three journeys to move all of the bombs from Lokmanya Road to the taking pictures vary,” stated a report.
The following day, the explosives’ specialists dismantled the “masterbox” of the automobile bomb. “At the Madukkarai taking pictures vary, bomb squad members rigged up a cable-and-pulley system, operated from behind the shelter of a rock, and commenced the dangerous manoeuvre of opening the lid of the field with out setting off the 15 kg of explosives inside.
Bomb disposal
The masterbox had 13 detonators. Powered by 15 nine-volt batteries, the gadget may have been switched on from the motive force’s seat of the automobile wherein it had been hidden. Four of the bins of the explosives discovered within the automobile had been wired to the masterbox. The two different bombs had been apparently meant to be transported elsewhere,” reported The Hindu.
Seshadri was relieved. “If the 60 kg of explosives had gone off, there would have been a crater eight ft deep and 30 ft throughout,” he famous. Approaching the car itself had been a danger – because the bomb may have been set off by distant management or generally explosives are timed to go off after a delay of even two or three days.
Detonation of the automobile bomb at Madukkarai Shooting Range in Coimbatore in February 1998 | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives
The bombs had been assembled with experience. The bomb disposal squad had in truth examined the unexploded bomb utilizing a pulley mechanism to look at if it could explode if dropped or tossed.
Seshadri described the four-day operation “probably the most difficult, tension-packed and talked-about bomb disposal operation of its variety.”
It was time to have fun. “Coimbatore breathed straightforward as soon as once more. Jubilant residents of R.S. Puram bore on their shoulders the commandos who had fearlessly carried out the high-risk dismantling operation and handled them to a victory parade that might have executed warfare heroes proud,” stated the Frontline report.
