Relatives of a blast victim peep through the window of their house in Jaipur on Friday. (PTI)

Jaipur/Lucknow, May 16: A car abandoned outside Jaipur railway station has emerged a possible lead in the blast probe, which has brought police from four states to the Rajasthan capital to exchange terror notes.

Jaipur police yesterday seized the Maruti Esteem with a Delhi registration, parked outside the station for several days, with an apparently cryptic message left on the dashboard.

“Zinda rahe to phir milenge (If I live, we’ll meet again),” said the scrawl on the back of a business card, which identified the owner as Mohammad Afzal of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh police sources said.

Lucknow police, tipped off by their Jaipur counterparts, raided the address given in the card but failed to find Afzal.

Officers said they were pursuing every possible lead and cautioned that like many others, this one too might not lead anywhere. The “zinda rahe” could be a figure of speech, they said.

According to the details on the card, Afzal is a businessman from Lucknow’s congested Hussainganj. But no Afzal lived at the address mentioned.

There had been a tenant by that name in a house two blocks away, but he left five months ago. Asif Iqbal, the landlord, said the Afzal who lived in his house for a year sold Kashmiri shawls.

Jaipur police said sources had told them that the Afzal who owned the car had urgently flown to Chennai a few days ago to visit his ailing mother. There was no immediate explanation why, if he had caught a flight, his car was parked outside the railway station.

With definite clues not yet emerging, police teams from Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra have held at least three joint meetings with their Rajasthan counterparts and Intelligence Bureau officials in Jaipur.

They have been exploring similarities with the May 2007 Hyderabad blasts, the November court attacks in Uttar Pradesh and the September 2006 Malegaon bombings.

Any link with Malegaon would bring the Students Islamic Movement of India, whose leader Safdar Nagori was recently arrested in Indore, into the picture.

One difference with Malegaon has been that eight of the 10 bicycles used in the Jaipur attacks have been traced to eight different shops in the Kishanpole area. Sources said this suggested that many sleeper cells were at work.

State minister Rajendra Rathore today said there had been nine blasts and not eight. “There were two cycles at Chandpol,” he said. A 10th bomb was defused near the Hanuman temple.

The police aren’t sure about RDX but sources said ammonium nitrate was probably used. The black smoke seen after the explosions suggests charcoal may have been part of the chemical mix.