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Villagers watch debris on Thursday morning after an explosion at Pingla in West

Midnapore

district. (PTI photo)

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BRAHMONBAR ( Pingla ): A powerful explosion in a house packed with explosives killed at least 12 people — several of them in their teens — and injured four in Pingla’s Brahmonbar village in West Midnapore on Wednesday night .The blast was so powerful that the house was ripped to shreds and body parts were flung on trees or hurled hundreds of metres away.In the backdrop of the Khagragarh blasts, the explosion triggered conspiracy theories, with the finger being pointed at Trinamool Congress since house owner Ranjan Maity is a ruling party member. Maity was arrested on Thursday.Police also didn’t help matters by sneaking around in the dark — officers insisted the dismembered body parts be retrieved in complete darkness and ordered fire truck headlights to be switched off. Villagers claim it wasn’t merely an illegal fireworks factory but a bomb-making unit. Among the dead is Ram Maity, who ran the illegal factory and had a history of arrests for possession of bombs, and his wife Reena.At ground zero, the sheer intensity of the blast leaves one speechless. The wide debris field, the presence of aluminium powder and metal cylinders that looked like shell casings indicate it may not have been a mere firecracker unit. Concrete pillars had snapped in half. Strips of clothes, blasted off victims’ bodies, hung from trees like shrouds, giving the smouldering site an eerie look. The explosion was so severe that it shredded a min-van into its bare metal frame.The explosion took place at 9.30pm, just after Ram had a showdown with his son, Notu, say villagers. “The blast was unlike anything we had seen or heard before. It was like a towering inferno coupled with an earthquake. After an ear-splitting explosion, there were a series of deafening blasts, like a machine-gun going off. It went on an on,” said villager Sanatan Tudu. The house was blown to smithereens and debris shot out like missiles. Chunks of human flesh rained down on the village. “It was like balls of fire being flung at us,” said Tudu. Some say the explosions went on for 30 minutes, some say it was an hour.Pingla OC Pankaj Mistri was among the first to arrive around 10.15pm. By then villagers had already called the fire brigade. Seeing the devastation, police also made frantic calls but the first fire engine arrived from Kharagpur, 45km away, at 11.30pm. A second one joined it after midnight. Senior police officers started trooping in and SP Bharati Ghosh arrived at 4am, only to run into a local protest. CID DIG-operations Dilip Adak and CID-OSD Purnashib Mukherjee also investigated the scene. Forensic experts were scrambled from Kolkata.Villagers, already angry with police for shielding Ranjan, viewed every police act with suspicion. They cut down trees and blocked roads to prevent police from removing the body parts, demanding that media crews be let in first. Police went around sorting charred body parts and used hooks to pull down dismembered limbs hanging from trees. Strangely, the cops chose to stumble around in pitch darkness, demanding that even fire tenders switch off their lights. Locals accused police of trying to hide the body count.Police say Ram and Ranjan were history-sheeters and that Ram was arrested several times for possession of bombs. Villagers claim three truckloads of explosives drove away from the unit a few days before the blast otherwise the carnage would have been far worse.IGP-western range S N Gupta said most of the dead were from other districts. Zilla parishad office-bearer Krishna Prasad Bera said no permission or trade license was issued to Ram to run the unit, prompting villagers to question why police never checked it in spite of several complaints.Ranjan has been arrested. Trinamool was quick to shift the blame to CPM, claiming that Ranjan was a CPM leader, and BJP said Ram had joined the saffron party eight months ago. But Ranjan’s mother, 70-year-old Urmila Maity, said he was a Trinamool leader.