Chennai, Feb. 20: The LTTE boat seized in Indian waters last week carried enough hidden explosives to blow up a part of Chennai port where it was brought, police said today.

The 24-foot-long mechanised vessel was today towed 37 km off the Chennai coast and destroyed in a controlled explosion.

Central and state intelligence sources believe the boat was carrying a suicide squad on a specific mission when it was intercepted in Palk Strait by coast guard ship Ramadevi on February 14. The five occupants, four of them Sri Lankan Tamils, have been handed over to the police.

The fibreglass boat had yielded a huge arms haul, including an AK 56 rifle and a 7-kilo jacket used by suicide bombers, immediately after the seizure. But only a bomb squad search revealed the explosives.

The arrested men later told interrogators that more explosives were concealed inside the boat’s fibre plates, state police chief D. Mukherjee said this evening.

Had they been set off by a timer or remote-controlled device, there could have been a disaster at Chennai port, he added.

A Chennai magistrate’s order was obtained to blow up the boat. At 11 this morning, it was towed by a coast guard ship deep into the sea and the “explosives were defused and destroyed”, Mukherjee said.

The coast guard said the rebel boat, captured off Kodiyakarai, south of Nagapattinam, was travelling towards the Tamil Nadu coast.

But the police insisted that the vessel was headed north of Jaffna from an islet called Irainaitheevu, and was caught when it strayed into Indian waters while evading the Sri Lankan Navy’s surveillance.

The explosives it carried, however, have aggravated concern over the smuggling of arms and ammunition by the rebels through several landing points in the state, especially near the Rameshwaram coast and south of Nagapattinam.

Rameshwaram police today arrested two persons, Gunasekhara Pandiyan and Selvaraj, and seized from them 33 gunny bags containing aluminium bars that go into the manufacture of explosive devices. The aluminium bars were being ferried from a Madurai godown.

This was the third seizure of bomb-making material in the state in recent weeks.