Amritsar: Punjab DGP Suresh Arora on Sunday hinted at involvement of Pakistan-based terrorists in the grenade attack on the Nirankari Bhawan in Amritsar, but maintained that it was too early to predict anything about the identity of the perpetrators.Arora told TOI on Sunday that nobody had claimed responsibility for the attack so far. However, he said since the attack was not against an individual, the police were construing it could be a terror incident. “If it had been an act against an individual, it could have been out of personal animosity. In this incident, the attack was against a group of innocent people where females and children were also injured, so we take it as a terror attack,” Arora said.The DGP said the police had received certain leads and were working on those. “It is too early to claim that there has been a breakthrough.”Asked whether the National Investigation Agency (NIA) would investigate the incident, Arora said, “Whenever this kind of incident happens in the country, the NIA visits the spot and assesses whether there is any inter-state or international dimension to it. They have been working in Jammu & Kashmir and we will get enriched by their perspective.”Asked if the attack was a police failure as the state had got intelligence inputs early, the Punjab Police chief said, “We have been getting information from central agencies, from interrogation reports, through our own intelligence wing. However, somehow this group (the Nirankari sect) never figured in the inputs. There were other likely target groups and we were focusing on those. With this particular group, there was neither any controversy nor a specific input, so I would say it is not an intelligence failure.”Asked whether there could be any link with the Referendum 2020 group or Pak-based Sikh terrorists, the DGP said: “If we say Pak outfits, we know that some of our wanted terrorists have been camping in Pakistan , obviously they are not their guest. If we talk of 2020, we know there had been building of radicalization — we had busted a module in Patiala also.”

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