Negligence of people, cafe management led to blast: Pune police chief

PUNE - A month after the Feb 13 Pune blast, city Police Commissioner Satyapal Singh Saturday charged the management of German Bakery and the people with “utter negligence” and said the bag with the bomb had been lying unnoticed for over 90 minutes.

“It was not a few minutes or 10-15 minutes, more than one-and-half hours and yet nobody bothered to notice it… This is sheer carelessness on the part of the people,” he said, addressing a rally of over 1,000 students at the Azad campus here. The event was organised by the Sakal Social Foundation.

According to Singh, the presence of the bag was also brought to the notice of the cashier by some customers of the German Bakery, but he was “too busy” in his work to even take note of it and bother to inform the police.

“Barely 20 minutes later, the bomb exploded there. I am sure that if the German Bakery staff and its patrons had exercised more awareness, the blast could have been prevented and so many innocent lives could have been saved,” Singh said.

The Feb 13 blast left 17 dead, including five foreign nationals.

Despite the multi-pronged investigations by several state and central agencies, the investigators seem to have drawn a blank in the motives behind the blast or its perpetrators.

Meanwhile, ‘nirbhayta’, or fearless, rallies were organised in different parts of the city here morning in which city residents, foreign nationals and students from scores of city colleges took part and paid homage to those killed in the terror blast.