Birbhum police on Sunday recovered a plastic container packed with crude bombs from Bogtui village, the spot barely 150 metres from where chief minister Mamata Banerjee met family members of the March 21 carnage victims on March 24 and 20 metres from the road her convoy took that day.

The bomb disposal squad of Bengal police recovered plastic containers with 20 bombs and defused those in an open field at Chandankuntha village, adjacent to Bogtui, on Sunday afternoon.

Recovery of crude bombs from Bogtui triggered a fresh controversy as some police officers said the village should have been scanned and sanitised properly soon after the March 21 massacre, especially before Mamata’s visit to the village on March 24.

While the bombs apparently lay hidden in a trench at Bogtui, the chief minister stood at the carnage site close to the explosives and instructed the director-general of police Manoj Malviya to carry out raids across the state to seize illegal arms and ammunition with 10 days.

“It points to a serious lapse on the part of the police that bombs at Bogtui village were found after 12 days of the carnage. It goes to show that the place was not scanned properly even after directives from the chief minister,” said a senior police officer.

Several sources in the police said they were shocked to know that crude bombs existed in close vicinity of the chief minister’s route and the place where she spent around 40 minutes on March 24 afternoon.

“It is the responsibility of the police to get intelligence inputs and find out hideouts where goons have stockpiled explosives or arms,” said another police officer.

Other senior police personnel echoed the same concerns.

“It is the duty of the police to find out the bombs from secret places. The district police need to be asked why it took them so much time to recover the bombs in Bogtui, while ammunition and arms were being seized from across the state. The failure of police intelligence needs to be looked into,” said a senior IPS officer.

Birbhum police chief Nagendra Nath Tripathi, however, brushed aside the charges of police failure to sanitise Bogtui.

“If you notice, all those bombs were hidden very tactfully and it was not possible to find them out without getting specific source information. We recently found someone who saw the goons hide the bombs there. As soon as we got the information, we recovered and defused the bombs,” said Tripathi.

The bombs were kept behind the house of Palash Sheikh, one of the accused in the murder of Trinamul’s deputy chief of Barshal gram panchayat Bhadu Sheikh.

They were kept in a plastic container tucked inside a trench with bricks covering it from public view.

Only the blue lid of the plastic container was visible outside through a small gap.

Police sources said a local boy on Saturday informed the police about the crude bombs.

The police primarily cordoned the areas to avoid any untoward incident and informed the CID’s bomb disposal squad which defused them.

In the past few days, acting on the chief minister’s directive, the police have recovered hundreds of crude bombs and fire arms from various places in the state.

In Birbhum, over 200 crude bombs and a few arms were also recovered as part of the special drive. On Saturday, a Trinamul leader from South 24-Parganas was arrested for possessing a gun illegally.

As the failure of police intelligence at Bogtui cropped up following the massacre, the government on March 24 asked police chiefs to ask intelligence officers to gather inputs about inter-party or intra-party rivalries across the state.