A homemade crude bomb of low intensity was hurled today outside the Sonargaon Pan-Pacific hotel in Dhaka where President Pranab Mukherjee is staying.
No one was injured in the blast which took place around 2 pm, said Apoorva Hassan, the officer in-charge of Tejgaon police station. Two persons came on a motorcycle and hurled the bomb wrapped in a cap near the SAARC fountain, about 50 yards away from the hotel at a street intersection, he said.
The two managed to escape and no one was arrested in this connection, he added. Security around the hotel has been further strengthened after the attack. It was not immediately whether the President, on a three-day state visit to Bangladesh, was inside the hotel or not. The incident came on the second day of the 48-hour strike called by fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami party against the sentencing of three of its top leaders in 1971 war crimes cases.