By IANS
Lucknow : The blame game has begun in Uttar Pradesh, a day after serial terror bombings in three towns killed 13 people, with opposition parties Saturday training their guns on the Mayawati government while a cracker going off in Mughal Serai, near Varanasi, led to panic for a while.
The cracker that went off in Mughal Serai Saturday morning led to panic.
Confirming this, Varanasi divisional commissioner Nitin Gokaran told IANS: “The district magistrate and superintendent of police have personally inspected the site of the blast, but eventually it turned out to be just a loud Diwali cracker.”
The three cities where the blasts had also injured 59 on Friday — Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad — were calm on Saturday morning.
But activists of the opposition Samajwadi Party blocked rail traffic at Allahabad, protesting against what they termed as “failure of the Mayawati administration”.
Opposition parties are accusing both the ruling Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in the state and the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance in New Delhi for the “intelligence failure”.
Senior state Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Om Prakash Singh called it an “intelligence failure of both central and state agencies”.
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) gave a call for a state-wide shutdown Saturday. VHP chief Ashok Singhal told a press conference: “The manner in which terrorists have struck on Friday simply reflects the gross impotence of both the state and the central governments in containing terror.”
He said: “What needs to be checked is the mushrooming growth of madrasas, many of which are nurseries or sanctuaries of terrorists.”
Lawyers’ groups are planning to take out a protest march Monday against what they termed “failure” of the government to contain terror.
“We wish to draw the government’s attention to the fact that this is the first time that terrorists have targeted the nation’s judicial system and unless stern steps are taken to nip this in the bud, the consequences could be really grave,” prominent state lawyer and former advocate general and bar association chief Veerendra Bhatia told IANS.
He said: “We propose to take out a march on Monday to highlight the government’s failure to provide security to courts and to lawyers, who were a part and parcel of the judicial system.”
The police have released the sketch of a man in his early 30s suspected to be the one to have placed the bomb at the Lucknow civil court premises. Eyewitnesses said they saw a man of that description parking a bicycle in the court premises.