Is the city prepared for terror attacks?

How safe is B’lore from terror attacks?
VIJAY TIMES NEWS

Bangalore: Prevention is better than cure, they say. But the City has no preventive mechanism in place to avoid a terrorist attack on the scale of what was carried out on New York’s World Trade Centre towers this day, precisely three years ago.

This has come to light after a detailed probe carried out by the Vijay Times team at various crucial centres in the City, which include an array of defence and space installations, apart from the seat of the State’s political power, Vidhana Soudha, and the Bangalore Airport.

The revelation gains significance specially after a pamphlet was recovered from a Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorist who was shot dead by the Indian Army in a northern location of Jammu and Kashmir. The officials discovered that the terrorist organisation may have had plans to target the City. A red alert message issued by the Intelligence Bureau to authorities in the City stated, “The LeT was targeting ISRO, HAL, airport and other key installations in the City.”
However, despite such warnings, security check at various key installations appear weak, making these installations largely vulnerable to any such attack. For instance, all these installations have frame metal detectors apart from hand-held metal detectors.

But officials admit these can detect only weapons with metal base, while leaving out plastic explosives — the ones which were used in the Mumbai serial blasts on March 12, 1993. Presently, the only ‘technology’ in the arsenal of the security forces to detect plastic explosives is the sniffer dog, expertly trained and conditioned to specifically sniff out such explosives that miss the metal detectors or the X-ray machines. But the dogs are hardly seen at the entrances of key installations. Moreover, Karnataka has a defunct Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS). The ATS, formed 10 years ago, to coordinate with other agencies is today running headless.