3 die in Punjab grenade attack

Strike on Nirankari congregation; cops suspect terror angle

In what may be a terrorist incident, three people were killed and 20 others injured when two motorcycle-borne masked youths threw a grenade at a Nirankari congregation in Rajasansi area in Amritsar on Sunday. An NIA team was heading for Amritsar when reports last trickled in.

The attack took place at the Nirankari Satsang Bhawan in Amritsar's rural belt, three km from the Guru Ram Das international airport.

Punjab Director General of Police Suresh Arora, who rushed to the spot along with senior Punjab Police officers, claimed that it was a "terror act". "We are treating it as a terror act. The attack was targeted at a group and not an individual. That's why we are taking it as a terror act,’’ We did not have any specific input of a strike against any particular group," he told the media.

Witnesses told the police that two youths on a motorcycle, their faces covered, barged into the campus by pointing a pistol at a woman volunteer at the gate. "Everything happened within a couple of minutes. They got in, threw the grenade and fled," one man told the police.

Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh has directed the police to immediately enhance security arrangements at all sensitive places, terming it as "the first such indiscriminate attack on innocent people in recent past".

A crater three inches in diameter created by the impact of the explosion was being examined by the forensic team. "The possibility of involvement of ISI-based Khalistani/Kashmiri terror groups cannot be ruled out,’’ the Chief Minister said in a statement.

The Nirankari sect, with headquarters in Delhi, has millions of followers across the country and abroad.

In recent months, Khalistani and Kashmiri activists have been trying to foment trouble in Punjab, which shares a 553-km long barbed wire fenced international border with Pakistan. The Punjab Police, along with the Jammu and Kashmir Police, had recently busted two modules of Kashmiri students who were studying in institutions in Punjab and having links to terrorist outfits in troubled Kashmir.

Posters of Kashmiri terrorist Zakir Mussa had mysteriously appeared in Punjab's Gurdaspur district on Friday saying that he had been seen in Punjab.