Balangir: The sub-divisional judicial magistrate of Patnagarh on Wednesday extended the crime branch remand of Punjilal meher, the main accused in the parcel bomb blast case, for another five days.

Though crime branch had prayed for a further remand of eight days, the court allowed five-days' crime branch custody of the accused for further interrogation and investigation. Meher was produced before the court on Wednesday after his previous six-day remand came to an end.

From the court, Meher was taken to Patnagarh sub-jail and was again handed over to crime branch for the second-phase remand. The court has asked the crime branch to produce the accused before it on May 7 in the forenoon.

Sources said crime branch had decided to use the second-phase remand of Meher in the field to corroborate their findings. Crime branch may take him to various places, including Raipur, to further strengthen their evidence against the accused. In another development, a team of the crime branch is carrying out investigation in Raipur to track the driver of the auto-rickshaw and the cycle-rickshaw owner in which Meher travelled in Raipur to commit the crime.

"The first phase of the remand had yielded the desired result as we have got several important clues to establish the crime," said Special Investigation Team head and additional superintendent of police in crime branch Anil Kumar Das. Meher, an English lecturer, was arrested on April 25 as the only accused who masterminded the plan and executed the crime. The crime branch had seized laptops from the house of the accused which has been sent to the National Forensic Laboratory in Gandhinagar for retrieval of data. Efforts are on to send the hard disk of the closed-circuit television (CCTV) camera of one of the courier offices of Raipur to an Israel-based agency for examination that may give information about Meher's presence at the counter of the courier office.

On February 23, newlywed Soumya Sekhar Sahu and his grandmother Jemamani had died while unwrapping a gift parcel that blasted. Sahu's wife Reemarani was also critically injured in the blast and was admitted in the plastic surgery ward of SCB Medical College and Hospital in Cuttack.