Siliguri, April 14: Police today released the picture of a woman said to be the key link in the Champasari blasts and explosives recovered from Mallaguri and Gurung Bustee in the past 11 days.

The woman was identified by the only blast survivor, Dipen Rai. Police have evidence that she used to frequent all three places. However, they are not sure if she was the woman who died in the twin explosions in Champasari on April 3, which killed three of the alleged bomb makers. The police also conducted a raid on a house near Sevoke Road at night. Jyotsna Sarkar, the landlady, said she had rented out her rooms to eight Nepali girls, two of whom are missing for the past two days. The others were “on duty” at various nursing homes. Earlier in the day, the police had detained Ganga Gurung, who had given them the address of Jyotsna’s house “where some girls from Nepal lived”.

Like Dipen, Ganga, too, is from the Beldangi I refugee camp in eastern Nepal. “Dipen Rai, the only survivor of the blast and an accused, is currently at North Bengal Medical College and Hospital, being treated for more than 50 per cent face burns. Only after he recovers enough, can we get more information on the woman whose picture we have got,” said Swapan Ghosh, the inspector-in-charge of Pradhannagar police station, which covers Champasari, Mallaguri and Gurung Bustee.

The Champasari blasts had triggered a hunt that led the police to a house in Gurung Bustee on Saturday night. Ten IEDs and six timers were recovered from a part of the house rented out to three girls who had identified themselves to the landlady as Tina, Nitu and Merry. Bikash Basumatari, a 22-year-old, and his parents — also tenants in the same house for the past two years — were detained. The girls had gone missing after the blasts, the landlady said. The police had tracked down Bikash after his name appeared in documents seized from Champasari. They conducted a raid on the house before the landlady could report the missing girls, who had claimed they were trainee nurses.

In Mallaguri, five days after the Champasari blasts, a retired power department employee had reported that his tenants had been missing since April 3. The police then broke open the room rented out to two men, one of them later identified by the landlord as Dipen, and recovered some explosives. “During the investigation that followed, we found the photograph of a woman, who we suspect is a key link in all the three incidents,” the police officer said.

Today after giving the photograph to the media, the police said both Dipen and Bikash have confirmed the woman’s presence in all three places. “We identified the woman after showing her picture to Dipen and the detainee (Bikash),” said a police officer.

“She might have either escaped or died when the explosives went off. The face of the woman who was killed had been so badly mutilated that it was difficult to identify her. The main objective of distributing the picture is to collect information,” Ghosh said.

Earlier in the day, the police had picked up six trainee nurses, including Ganga, from a nursing home, which had been named by the missing tenants to the landlady in Gurung Bustee.