Bomb hunter

Gopalji Mishra, head of a special Punjab Police forensics and technologies cell, with the prototype of a remote-controlled robot device for disposal of explosives. - AKHILESH KUMAR

One of India's top crime scientists speaks out on the need for new investments in counter-terrorism technologies.

OUR robot, they call it: the inelegant assembly of wood planks, rusting iron angles and protruding wires that runs on wheels that seem to have been ripped off children's tricycles found in a scrap yard. It is, in fact, India's first indigenous bomb-disposal barrow, a robot intended to move potential bombs to areas where they can safely be examined or detonated. Incredibly, it works.

The genial portly man who built the machine smiles: "Nice, isn't it? I don't think it will ever go into production, though. Once we rig it with the usual bells and whistles, I think it will cost around Rs.150,000. The imported version costs Rs.3.2 million. I'm betting no one will be interested in our cheap machine, because they're too busy making money off expensive imports."

Another robot is also being put together in the office. Assembled from the bottom half of a hand-driven lawnmower and engine parts retrieved from junk, the machine is designed to help the police check buildings for hidden terrorists without risking their lives. Although dozens of Indian policemen and armed forces personnel die each year in such operations, no organisation has seen fit to invest in the project.

Forensic scientist Dr. Gopalji Mishra, the head of a special Punjab Police forensics and technologies cell, knows all about death. Along with Dr. S.N. Sharma and Dr. L.S. Rana, Mishra is known to have played a key role in solving dozens of high-profile terror strikes, including the assassination of Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh and the Mumbai serial bombings of 1993.

Unlike most forensic scientists, Mishra does not see his role as confined to just analysing the detritus of terror. He helped design and manufacture armoured tractors for the Punjab Police, an appropriate and cost-effective technology that denied terrorists the use of sugarcane fields as sanctuaries. Now, as India finds itself in the midst of another sustained terror offensive, Mishra believes the time has come for him to speak out on what science can do to save lives.

Former Punjab Director-General of Police K.P.S. Gill ordered Mishra and his team to travel to Mumbai hours after news arrived of the serial bombings. "Terrorism in Punjab had started to be crushed," Mishra recalls, "and there was a good deal of intelligence suggesting the Khalistan groups were planning a spectacular action. Our job was to advise Mumbai's Commissioner of Police on whether that was what happened."

"One of my professional colleagues thought the attacks might have been carried out by Khalistan terrorists," he recalls, "because the pencil timers used in the bombs were of a type the police had recovered in Punjab. They were thin, copper-and-brass tubes with five colour-coded settings, which can be used to time an explosion to take place from half an hour to eight hours. But I'd spent hours sitting in on police interrogations of top Khalistan terrorists, and knew that their bomb-makers did not trust these new-fangled devices! I think every forensic scientist will benefit from involving themselves in actual investigations, which is the only way to get inside the minds of our enemies. Sadly, most never get the chance."

Along with experts from the Intelligence Bureau, the National Security Guard and the Central Bureau of Investigations, as well as scientists from Central Forensic Sciences Laboratories at Kolkata, Chandigarh and Hyderabad, Mishra and his team also worked to determine the kind of explosive used in the bombs. "You can't jump to conclusions," he warns, "because it isn't true that only RDX or PETN can cause havoc. Ammonium nitrate and fuel oil mixtures have often been used to lethal effect around the world. We had to examine the damage at the bomb sites carefully and carry out chemical tests before we could determine that RDX had been used."

Mishra's team knew that no terrorist strike executed by Khalistan terrorists had used more than 5 kg of RDX. In the Mumbai strikes, though, no device appeared to have contained less than 20 kg of RDX. Some bombs, like those planted in the Air India Building and the Mumbai Stock Exchange, contained between 35 kg and 40 kg. "Bomb-makers, like all of us, have habits," Mishra says. "I knew the men who made bombs for the Babbar Khalsa International or the Khalistan Liberation Front, and I knew these were not the kinds of devices they would have felt comfortable fabricating. So again, field experience is crucial."

Finally, sifting through the tonnes of debris at the bomb sites, Mishra and his colleagues also discovered some of the evidence that made it possible for investigators to build a credible case against the Dawood Ibrahim mafia and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence - a case based on hard evidence, not custodial interrogation. Experts determined, for example, that engine number 6EH095868 once powered the white Ambassador car that was turned into the bomb at the Air India building.

Fragments of gearbox and engine numbers from two Maruti cars used to house bombs were also recovered from the debris at the Lucky Petrol Pump and Plaza Cinema. The police were then able to trace the cars to the perpetrators.

Mishra tells his story slide by slide, choosing from among the hundreds of crime photographs: "All of this took a lot of time and a lot of patience," Mishra recalls. "There were several hundred tonnes of debris to sift through. Ideally, we should be able to seal off bomb sites for days or even weeks until forensic examiners are able to finish their work. You see that abroad, but in India few people understand the importance of ensuring the integrity of a crime scene. People trample all over things and destroy our chances of finding the little fragments of debris that could lead us to the perpetrators."

"Investigators also have to keep up with technology and events," Mishra says. After the 1993 terrorist attack on Congress leader Maninder Singh Bitta at the Youth Congress headquarters in New Delhi, police investigators found a cordless telephone on a nearby street. Mishra refused to believe that it was the device used to trigger the explosion. "But later," he recalls, "it turned out that this particular model did send out a signal to the required distance. I just hadn't kept abreast of changes in cordless phone technologies. To be a good forensic scientist, one must see each case as a new opportunity to educate oneself - and always must be ready to accept you were wrong," Mishra concluded.

"I see a lot of things in the papers," he says wryly, "which given that you journalists get your information from responsible people, leads me to worry about the state of forensic knowledge in some States. I read articles saying that RDX-based devices don't leave any burn marks, which is nonsense. I read articles saying RDX is a rare, hard to get explosive, when anyone with a chemistry degree and a little enterprise can make it in his kitchen.

In Jammu and Kashmir, terrorists have even started manufacturing their own detonators and triggering devices with locally available components. What I don't read worries me even more. I don't see newspaper articles calling for better regulation of commercial chemicals, which can be used to make bombs. I don't read about unscrupulous dealers being tried and punished."

"What I'm most worried about," Mishra says, "is that I hear a lot of people talking about the problem, but few discussions about solutions. We all say we're determined to fight terrorism, but where are the investments in new and world-class forensic laboratories or centres of crime research? Why is that we have so few trained crime-scene investigators? Do we think our own people's lives are cheap?"