Lashkar-e-Qahab owns up to Varanasi blasts

A hitherto unknown militant outfit, that calls itself Lashkar-e-Qahab, today claimed responsibility for Tuesday's twin blasts in Varanasi, in which 20 people were killed and over 50 were injured.

A caller introducing himself as Abu Feroz, a spokesman of the outfit, contacted a private TV channel here claiming responsibility for the massacre and threatened similar attacks in other cities unless the government stopped its "catch and kill" campaign in Jammu and Kashmir.

An executive of the channel said Feroz spoke in Urdu with a heavy Punjabi accent.

The police said they had heard the name of the outfit for the first time and that it could be an offshoot of some other outfits active in the state.

SSP Srinagar Muneer Ahmed Khan said they could not say with certainty that the outfit was an offshoot of the infamous Lashkar-e-Taiba.

"We will sift through the records to see if there is any link (between the two Lashkars)," Khan said.

Meanwhile, investigators in Varanasi today examined the video cassette of a marriage ceremony that was taking place when the bomb exploded in the Sankatmochan temple in order to identify the attackers and picked up some fingerprints from the sites.

They had also been able to locate two PCOs in the city from where the attackers had talked to their operatives after the blasts, official sources said. The investigators were going through the details of the calls made to various places, including Nepal, Dhaka and Pakistan.

They have obtained details about suspected militants from the owner of a shop, which the attackers had visited before the blasts and had left a cooker bomb, similar to the one used in trigerring the explosions. Based on the shopkeeper's version, the investigators have prepared the sketch of the militants. The visuals of the marriage ceremony was expected to throw light on the identity of the suspected attackers, they said.

Besides the video, the investigators were examining a magazine left by a saffron-clad man and a woman wearing a blue sari, near a shop in godowlia market after planting live bombs near the Dashaswamedh Ghat, they said, adding that forensic tests had been conducted on the fingerprints obtained from the magazine.

The Uttar Pradesh police today released the sketches of two suspected terrorists who had allegedly planted a pressure cooker bomb in the busy Godowalia market here on Tuesday, the day of the two blasts in Varanasi.

Meanwhile, a steady stream of VIPs visited the Sankatmochan temple as it was business as usual in the city with people thronging various shrines while the board examinations went on as scheduled even as security personnel remained deployed in strength at sensitive points and vital installations.

After a near total bandh yesterday to protest the terror attacks, the markets, schools and public offices opened and the vehicular traffic was bustling on the streets as normalcy appeared to have returned in the city with no sign of panic anywhere.