Investigators are strongly convinced that the duffel bags with the bombs would have been planted at a station close to Chennai Central, sometime before the train arrived. But, as far as most passengers on the Kaziranga Express are concerned, the lax security at Bangalore was to blame for the bomb blasts.
Less than 12 hours ago, Bennett and Kapil were supremely happy with the security arrangements at the Bangalore City Junction railway station. Not only had the student-cum-restaurant employees from Shillong managed to sneak in a bottle of rum on board, they admitted to have gone a step higher, literally. “We were going home after almost a year, so we wanted to have a great time on the journey, you know. We went outside the station and called a dealer who we know from before, waited and bought some weed (marijuana) from him. After that we strolled right past the cops and nobody asked us anything,” recalls Bennett, a Philosophy major.
Another student, Shubham Singhania, a third-year engineering grad from Bangalore’s Jain College said that the security at Bangalore station was “appalling”. Travelling to Howrah for his summer vacation, Singhania was livid. “People could walk in and out of the station carrying several bombs. They could have come in by avoiding the metal detector and no policeman would have noticed. In fact, there were no policemen all the way from the entrance to the train and we were there for a really long time,” he says.
Southern Railway officials refuted these claims and stoically maintained that Bangalore Railway Station was “fortified and secure”.