Roping in more investigation officers who have cracked terror-related cases, the Special Invest-igation Team (SIT) that probed the Ernakulam collectorate blast is set to launch a fresh start to the case. P.N. Unnirajan, supe-rintendent of police, Thri-ssur crime branch and Biju K. Stephen, circle inspector of Ernakulam crime bran-ch CID have been brought into the team now in an attempt to solve the three-year old mystery behind the collectorate bomb blast.
The SIT believes that the blast incident has a strong connection to the Kizhakk-ambalam jewellery robbery and murder attempt case in 2002 in which the suspected Lashkar-e-Taiba commandant Thadiyanta-vide Nazeer was involved.
In the Kizhakkambalam case, a gang of nine members brutally attacked the Kachappilli Jewellery own-er Mathew John and his sons and robbed 2.25 kg of gold.
K.P. Shabeer and Bomb Ismail, the two aides of Nazeer who were arrested in the Kizhakkambalam case had earlier confessed that the money from Kizhakkambalam and similar robberies was used to strength the LeT operations in India that were responsible for blasts in different parts of the country including the ones in Bengaluru, Coimbatore and Kozhikode.
This points to the fact that the collectorate blast must also have taken place using the funds gained from the robbery.
They suspect that the collectorate blast was the last operation carried out by the team headed by Nazir. Soon after this, he was arr-ested by the Border Sec-urity Force (BSF) near the India-Bangladesh border in December 2009.
However the SIT is yet to receive a strong hint in the case. The blast took place on June 10, 2009. The bomb was put in a heap of waste on the fifth floor of the collectorate and attached to a timer.
Since the probe reached almost a dead-end, B. Sandhya IPS, who heads the SIT, convened a meeting in Kochi last week to kick-start the probe again.