Exit Chhotu. Enter Abdul. The Media and the Investigators on Pune blast

Till a fortnight ago the print and electronic media was sensationalizing the discovery of Salman chhotu as the key figure in Pune bomb blast and now it is Abdul Samad. Raising the adrenaline by hook or crook is the order of the day. If Shakespeare were alive today he would have very excellent night watch Dogberry as a cop. Keeping watch in the town would be such a fun no one would like to turn in.
Even a mainstream paper like The Times of India said that Rajasthan police’s getting Salman chhotu for investigation in the Ajmer blast was a ‘distant dream’. The investigators of several states were falling over each other to reach him and ask him to help them resolve terror cases. The media was on the cusp of becoming the cop as the cop was self conscious of appearing before the public. Another paper speculated that it would be a year before another state would have opportunity to interrogate chhotu. Is our chhotu such a mine of information?
This time around The Times of India is again somersaulting. Its crime report from Mumbai(Pune blast: 5 more likely to be arrested, May 26, 2010) speaks of two RAW sleuths travelling from United Arab emirate to Mangalore and then ATS from Maharashtra husking away Abdul Samad to Mumbai. Five more would be arrested for inquiry, presumably on the leads Abdul must have provided. Did he? As the reporter calls him ‘prime accused’, what has the newspaper on Abdul to attach this epithet to the stripling youth from Bhatkal? He is called the planter of the bomb at the German bakery. If the cops knew this twenty days after February 13, why this dilly dallying in arresting him then?

A day after the same paper from its Bangalore edition('Bhatkal's brother being framed'Deepak Kumar Shenvi & N D Shiva Kumar, May 27, 2010) has a different story. It says that Abdul Samad has a brother Mohammad Ahmed whom the police mistakenly called Yasin Bhatkal. Yasin Bhatkal is a step brother of Abdul. After this hilarious drama that began at midnight the cops interrogated Abdul and let him go! Then what happened to the ‘planter of bomb’ that the police had identified Abdul 20 days after the explosion? Thus the comedy of errors verges on the dark comedy. It is this dark comedy that makes our cops excellent watchmen of our towns when we sleep for they never keep watch but go to sleep themselves.