In nuclear weapons theory, there is something called a “use it or lose it” dilemma. Something like this seems to have confronted Dr Umar Nabi Bhat, who worked as a physician at the Al Falah Hospital in Faridabad, and is accused of triggering the Red Fort blast on Monday, 10 November that killed him and at least a dozen people.
The reasoning goes that after he had heard of the arrests of the fellow doctors of his terrorist “module”, he decided that the device needed to be used, or it risked being lost since his arrest was probably imminent.
Dr Umar had escaped the police dragnet on 9 November and early morning the next day, he entered Delhi in an i20 car. What he did in the ensuing period is not clear, except that he spent three hours at a parking lot near Sunehri Masjid in Chandni Chowk. At 6.42 pm he emerged from it to join the traffic on the main road, going past the Red Fort, and at 6.52 pm the car exploded.
We are still uncertain about the nature of the device that exploded. Was it a poorly fabricated device that was unstable? After all, no ballistic materials—shrapnel or ball bearings—were found. Was the entire car rigged as a bomb? Was Dr Umar shifting the terrorist cache of ammonium nitrate and other materials to another place after the arrests of his fellow Al Falah doctors when the explosion took place? Or, was it a deliberate strike at a crowded area when there is peak traffic?