A whole year has passed since a low-intensity Improvised Explosive Device (IED) exploded in front of a pub on the busy Church Street, killing a woman and injuring three. But after going through nearly 3,000 hours of CCTV footage and following up on two crore calls, the National Investigating Agency (NIA) is hard-pressed for leads. This, perhaps, makes it the first cold case of all terror attacks in the city till date.
Investigators found similarities with the 2013 Patna blasts, and had brought two suspects from Bihar for questioning, but in vain.
Though the SIMI module that escaped from the prison in Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh in 2013, is suspected to have carried out the attack, intelligence sources said that they do not have evidence.
Last traced to Ballari and Hubballi, two members of the module were killed in an encounter in Nalgonda, Telangana in April 2015.
Mehdi's trial yet to beginMore than a year after his arrest and six months after the city police filed a charge sheet, the trial of pro-IS tweeter Mehdi Masroor Biswas is yet to begin. He is lodged in Parappana Agrahara Central Prison.
The State government hadn't even appointed a Special Public Prosecutor (SPP) until 10 days ago delaying the trial by more than five months.
Police sources said that they had written to the law department in June to appoint an SPP. They said that the law department was scouting for a suitable prosecutor proficient with the technical aspects of cyber crime.
Meanwhile, investigating officers are yet to receive a response from Google for their January 2015 letter. Biswas had multiple Gmail accounts and claims to have forgotten the passwords to two of these accounts. Sleuths wrote to Google seeking access to the contents of these two accounts, said a senior CCB official.
The official said that though they had the expertise to hack open the accounts, it would make the contents inadmissible in court as evidence. “Based on the contents of these two email accounts, a supplementary charge sheet may be filed,” the officer said.
