‘To teach wife a lesson’ stone quarry worker blows up home in Bengal

A stone quarry worker blew up his home with dynamite in Bengal’s Birbhum district on Wednesday morning “to teach his wife a lesson” but instead ended up in hospital with critical injuries.

Forty-two-year-old Jamir Mollah did not know his wife was not at home when he blew up the house in fit of rage. The couple’s teenaged son was also not at home.

Mollah allegedly stole the explosives from a quarry, police said. The incident happened on the heels of the seizure of a huge quantity of gelatin sticks and detonators in Birbhum. There are many quarries in this region where dynamite is widely used to blow up rocky surfaces.

A resident of Sahapur village in Birbhum’s Sadaipur area, about 220 km north of Kolkata, Mollah told the police that he wanted to teach his wife, Sabura Bibi, a lesson because she used to quarrel with him frequently.

On Wednesday, at around 10 am, the villagers heard a deafening noise and discovered that Mollah’s house was almost completely destroyed but the quarry worker had somehow managed to crawl out of the debris. He was then taken to the district hospital at Suri.

Sabura Bibi was shocked. “I was not home at that time. I never even thought that he could blow up his own house,” she said.

“We have started an investigation,” Kunal Agarwal, the district police superintendent, said.

Mollah works at a quarry in the Pachami area. He used to stay over at Pachami for days at a stretch and visit his wife whenever he got leave. He told police that his wife used to quarrel with him every time he came home.

The couple had a fight even on Tuesday night and Mollah planned the blast, a police officer said on condition of anonymity. Mollah will be interrogated again in hospital, he said.

On May 28, Birbhum police seized a huge quantity of explosives from Bahadurpur village near the Jharkhand border. A section of police officers suspect the explosives were meant for the banned Bangladeshi outfit Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).

The seizure included 11,000 gelatin sticks, 50,000 detonators and a huge quantity of ammonium nitrate. There are many stone quarries in the region and police say the explosives could have been siphoned off from official stocks of one or many of these quarries.

The seizure in Bahadurpur village came less than a week after Murshidabad police seized 98 kg bomb-making chemicals that was allegedly being sent to the JMB.

Manglu Khan and Sadekul Khan, who were arrested in Murshidabad, told police the explosives were smuggled in from Jharkhand.