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Cops puzzled by missile blast in TN district

Our Correspondent in Madurai

In hush-hush tones, the Tamil Nadu police is investigating the blast of what they call a 'training purpose tracer' (TPT) used by the infantry division of the Indian Army, which claimed two lives in a scrap aluminium factory at an industrial estate in Dindigul last week.

While the police is trying to keep public curiosity low by dismissing the blast as an accident, indications are that the TPT may be only one of the many that may have fallen into the hands of some militant group or the other.

While the police are said to be awaiting the full recovery of two scrap dealers who were also injured in the blast before drawing conclusions, their early indications about the source of the weapon seems to have been negated by independent inquiry.

The local police said the missile might have been among the 22 lost at an army training camp held at Bala-Vidudhi village in neighbouring Karur district in September that might have found their way to the scrap dealers. However, independent sources say no such camp was held in the locality in recent times.

According to informed sources, the missile belonged to the 1997 batch, whereas the infantry divisions, which alone are known to employ TPT, are still using only the 1984 batch missiles. Even here, the army units are not known to have carried them outside Madras among the towns in the state even for training purposes.

With the result, the local cops have alerted the anti-terrorist Q branch of the state police for further investigations. As the missile blast comes in the wake of the Rajakumar abduction in which pan-Tamil militants with known LTTE links have played a part, they are leaving nothing to chance.

With assembly elections in the state due next year, and at least two of the four past elections in Tamil Nadu rocked by poll-day violence -- it was Rajiv Gandhi's assassination in 1991, and the Coimbatore serial blasts in 1998 -- and the southern districts from Dindigul and Madurai downwards being in the vortex of frequent caste and communal clashes in the past, the police are actually not leaving anything to chance. Only that they are not spreading the word around, first to maintain secrecy, and secondly, not to scare the people.

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