Weapons Type 56 assault rifle Perpetrators Two unknown men Total number of deaths 1 (Munish Chander Puri) | Non-fatal injuries 4 Start date December 28, 2005 Attack type Shooting | |
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The December 2005 IISc shooting occurred on Wednesday, 28 December 2005 at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in the Indian city of Bangalore, killing Prof. Munish Chandra Puri of IIT Delhi and injuring four, after two or more unidentified gunmen fired at Puri and others. The state government of Karnataka declared the shooting to be a terrorist attack, making it the first such attack in Bangalore.
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Shooting
At around 7:00 pm local time (1:30 pm GMT), two people entered the IISc campus in a white Ambassador car. At around 7:20 pm, delegates attending the International Conference on Operations Research: Applications in Infrastructure Development, organised by the Operations Research Society of India at the JN Tata Auditorium on the IISc campus, were heading to dinner when the shooting began. Two gunmen, wearing black masks and army uniforms, started firing indiscriminately from a rifle, thought to be a Chinese Type 56, outside the auditorium.
Victims
Munish Chandra Puri, a Professor Emeritus at the mathematics department of the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, was wounded by bullets. He died en route to hospital. Three other scientists and a lab assistant were among the injured. One of the injured was a pregnant woman, who sustained injuries to her eye. The other three injured had serious bullet injuries and underwent emergency surgeries.
Investigation
The police later recovered a Chinese made Type 56 military rifle, twelve empty cartridges, one empty magazine, five live magazines (one half-spent), two grenades, and one live hand-grenade which they defused. The police surmise that the gunmen had escaped by scaling the boundary wall of the campus. Although no organisation has yet claimed responsibility, the police have not ruled out the involvement of the Pakistan-based terror outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). But the police discounted suggestions that the attack was linked to the arrival in the city of notorious gangster Abu Salem, who was in Bangalore for a narcoanalysis.
Aftermath
Besides a nationwide hunt for the attacker, the incident also prompted the police in Karnataka and other South Indian states to go on "high alert." Security at other premier institutions in India including the IIMs and IITs has been enhanced.
Police later arrested a number of suspects of Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indian origins. No specific connection to any terror group has been found, but police continue to suspect that it was the work of a radical Islamist group.