Through January, a series of bomb-like devices were found in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, accompanied by threat letters targeting UP CM Yogi Adityanath
On Thursday, the Madhya Pradesh police detained three men from Meja, in Uttar Pradesh’s Prayagraj district, on charges of planting a series of explosive-like devices in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. With this, the police claim to have solved a case that had kept the state police forces on tenterhooks, as the devices had been found accompanied by threat letters targeting Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.
The accused—identified as Prakash Singh, 36, Devesh Dubey, 25 and Ram Teerath, 35—were apprehended on the basis of cyber forensics and CCTV footage. The Rewa police had announced a reward of Rs 10,000 on the arrest of the accused. The first of the bomb-like devices planted by these men—a device that was basically a timer with a circuit—was found on an underpass on NH30 on the Rewa-Prayagraj Road on January 8, followed by a similar contraption on January 13 and again on January 16, this time on the Rewa-Mirzapur Road. The initial recovery had a letter mentioning CM Yogi Adityanath under it, while the latter recoveries had the letters pasted on the walls of the underpass. The writing in the letters was illegible and the words garbled. The devices first appeared on the Madhya Pradesh side of the border on January 21, at Suhagi, followed by two more at Gangev on January 26, and a fourth at Mauganj on January 29.
Prakash Singh is a mechanical engineer, having graduated from a college in Bhopal, while Devesh Dubey is a lawyer from Meerut. Police sources said that during interrogation, Prakash Singh claimed that he was suffering from epilepsy and had resorted to such acts after he lost his job. The police suspect that the men are also responsible for similar bomb-like objects that were found in Manikpur in 2015 and Prayagraj in 2016. The accused have been booked under section 505 of the IPC.
Since the devices had circuits and timers, and only the absence of explosives stopped them from being classified as bombs, the MP police had also called in the Anti-Terrorism Squad. And with elections due in UP, the state police are being extra-vigilant in the border regions. “There is a pattern we have observed in the planting of the device. It is localised around highways and the letter accompanying it is designed to attract media attention. There were other clues as well, and we were confident that the culprits would be caught,” said Rewa SP Navnit Bhasin, who was coordinating the investigation.
