Former Home Minister P. Sabitha Indra Reddy has welcomed the death sentence awarded to five persons who carried out the Dilsukhnagar twin bomb blasts on February 21, 2013, that killed 18 people and injured another 131.
When the ghastly incident triggered by Indian Mujahideen operatives stunned and shocked the city, the then Chief Minister, N. Kiran Kumar Reddy, and the Home Minister, Sabitha Indra Reddy, were among the first to reach the blast site within half an hour, ignoring the security advice that no VIP should go to such sites before they were sanitised.
Speaking to The Hindu , Ms. Reddy said the immediate thought after the incident was to rush to the place of blast. “The Chief Minister proceeded from Begumpet and I rushed to the spot from my residence in Srinagar colony that fateful evening. I instinctively felt like reaching out to the victims,” she recalled.
The Prime Minister also visited the city given the seriousness of the terrorist attack.
Recalling the impact of the powerful blasts she had witnessed that day, Ms. Reddy, the first woman Home Minister, said she could never forget the tragic scene. “To this day when I pass by that route, that bus stop, shops near by, they remind me of the ghastly incident that claimed lives of innocent people.”
Welcoming the judgement by the NIA Special Court, the former Home Minister said speedy trial and convictions would restore the confidence of people in the system and also of the investigating officers who cracked the case. The death penalty was the most appropriate punishment for those who shattered several families who lost their loved ones and left several maimed.
Ms. Reddy remembered the tragedy that struck a couple in her constituency in the Lumbini Park and Gokul Chat blast cases a few years before. A young woman was pregnant and her husband, who went to Gokul Chat to buy some snacks on his way home, became a victim. Speedy trials and punishments were a way to send a strong signal that those who perpetrate such violence would not go scot free, she said.
