The Southern Railway officials on Tuesday handed over the hard disk of the computer, which was used for recording of the video feeds from the surveillance cameras at the Katpadi railway station, to the CB-CID.
A police officer privy to the investigation of the twin bomb blasts at the Chennai Central railway station said they were not able to copy the video footages recorded by the surveillance cameras at the railway station here on May 1.
The CB-CID team went through the video footages for the last four days. The quality of the visuals was poor as the railways department had installed Visual Graphic Array model cameras at the station. It is old model gadgets with less than 2 mega pixel camera. “Though the surveillance cameras were intact and functioning properly, the quality of the visuals was not helpful enough in the investigation,” said the source.
The sleuths went through the video footage recorded on May 1 for multiple times since Friday. They found a man looking similar to the suspected person, who rushed out of the Chennai Central station minutes before the blast. However, after a thorough check of the footage recorded between 3 am and 4.45 am on May 1, they ruled out he was not the suspect. The sleuths said that there was a mismatch between the two. But, they wanted to go through the footages and compare it with the footages captured at Chennai Central.
However, the team was unable to copy video footages from the hard disk of the computer in the control room in the police station of the Railway Protection Force on platform no 1. “We reported the Southern Railway authorities about the technical difficulties in copying the video footages for further investigation,” said a police officer.
Railway officials sent a two-member team that removed the CPU unit along with the hard disk and handed it to the CB-CID team. After collecting it, Deputy Superintendent of CB-CID police, Vellore, C Vellaiyan and his team left for Arakkonam Railway Junction to collect video footages from the surveillance cameras there.
In Arakkonam, a total of 20 CCTV cameras were installed. The team would take the gadgets to Chennai to retrieve the footages for further investigation into the blast case.