New Delhi, July 27
A day after serial blasts in Ahmedabad killed 45 persons, the Union government today made it clear that a central agency to combat terrorism and related crimes need to be set up.

The government decided that a meeting of chief ministers of all states would be convened to build consensus to have a legislation to empower a specialised separate central agency to look into such incidents of terror. So far, the states had stone-walled the idea as law and order was a state subject and they feared losing that vital control over the police.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called home minister Shivraj Patil this morning and Patil reportedly made it clear that such a body was needed.

Meanwhile, home ministry officials said, “Though law and order falls under the purview of state governments, an amendment is required to the Constitution for the creation of such an agency.”

“The Central government will take the opinion of the chief ministers and will discuss how terror crimes are committed cutting across the boundaries of states and how each aspect is handled by respective state police.

The investigations and the subsequent prosecution gets hampered as too many investigators are involved.”

The plan is to have a central unit of the agency with regional or state-wise nodes that will scan through intelligence inputs generated from various sources and also work dedicatedly in the area of counter-terrorism.

Meanwhile, sources in the Intelligence Bureau said the “Indian Mujahideen” that was purported to be behind the blasts in Jaipur in May and in Ahmedabad yesterday was nothing but a pseudonym of the banned Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). It was a part of the Pakistan’s external intelligence agency, the ISI, plan to operate in the Indian heartland. Using the name of SIMI would expose its top leadership to interrogation as most of them were in jail.

Yesterday, senior BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani demanded that the Prevention of Terrorist Act (POTA) be reactivated. POTA, enacted by Parliament in 2002, was repealed when the Congress-led government took power in 2004 following complaints that it had been used to target members of a minority community.