BOMBGATE
Reality frequently outpaces fiction in Mumbai, home to the world’s largest film industry. On February 25, even as Mumbai grappled with the fear of a second wave of infections following the biggest spike in coronavirus cases in over four months, one of India’s most sensational real-life thrillers played out in the city’s southern tip. Two hours past midnight, a light-green Scorpio SUV with a fake licence plate and a white Innova MPV snaked their way along the undulating Pedder Road that bisects Mumbai’s poshest high ground—Malabar Hill and Cumballa Hill. The vehicles vended their way towards billionaire ridge—the Altamount Road on Cumballa Hill. Kumar Mangalam Birla has a house here, Mangalyan; the official bungalows of the BMC Commissioner, the RBI Governor and the Mumbai Port Trust Chairman are also in the same vicinity. But it was the tallest of them all—Mukesh Ambani’s billion-dollar residence Antilia, named after a mythical island in the Atlantic Ocean—that the vehicles seemed headed for.
They stopped 300 metres away from the opulent, 27-storeyed personal residence of India’s richest individual. Leaving the Scorpio parked on the pavement along the bend in the road, its driver boarded the Innova, and left. The next morning, at around 9 am, as Rajesh Singh, in front of whose grocery shop the Scorpio was parked, recalls, dark-blue safari suit-clad security members from the Ambani residence discovered the locked vehicle and intimated the Gamdevi police. The traffic police arrived shortly after and smashed open a window to gain access. Scattered inside the vehicle were 20 gelatin sticks weighing 2.6 kg, but no detonator to trigger off the explosives. A terse note in Hindi explained why. “Ye to sirf ek trailer hai. Neeta bhabhi, Mukesh bhaiyya, family ye to sirf ek jhalak hai. Agli baar ye saaman pura hokar tumhare pass aayega, aur poora intezaam ho gaya hai (This is only a trailer, a glimpse. Next time, the material will reach you in complete form. All arrangements have been made).”
There are whispers about a ‘Thane nexus’ of rogue cops. They are suspected to be behind both the Antilia incident as well as the murder of auto parts dealer Mansukh Hiran
It was the kind of filmi jargon the Karachi-based underworld used when they wanted to extort money from city businessmen and film personalities in the 1990s. Gelatin sticks are used to blast rocksides for stone quarrying or breaking down rocks while building roads and bridges. They have frequently been used by the Maoists to make improvised explosive devices to attack security forces. Placed inside a vehicle and set off by a detonator, they expand at a supersonic speed to become superheated gas bubbles, exerting a pressure of over a million pounds per square inch that can blow passing vehicles into smithereens. Bombay experienced this first-hand on March 12, 1993, when the Pakistan army’s ISI and Dawood Ibrahim’s gangsters teamed up. The military-grade RDX stuffed into parked cars
