Human body parts, which till minutes ago had life in them, lie inert on the streets as busy feet rush by.
You stop and stare and shudder.
“When there’s a blast, everything is in motion and robotic. You want to get on with finding out information and then you come upon a piece of human flesh, in front of you. It scared me,’’ said Bismee Taskin, ThePrint’s Special Correspondent, recalling the scene after the car blast in Delhi on 10 November.
Suraj Singh Bisht, ThePrint’s Principal Photographer, saw body parts flung far and wide after the car explosion which killed 15 people. “I saw people walking over bones and flesh. They didn’t even notice because they were in such a hurry to get away from there in case there were more blasts,’’ he recalled.
Bisht took photographs that showed us the wreckage of that Monday evening: besides the singed human remains, he captured a solitary chappal’s lonely vigil, a man’s hidden eyes, another’s public grief, people everywhere, and vehicles in cinders.
Then, the police appeared along with ambulances, fire engines — and barricades to protect the site of the bomb blast, which read, “Do not cross the line’’.
But a line had been crossed and the damage had been done. Apart from killing 15 people and leaving 30 injured, the blast, triggered by Dr Umar un Nabi behind the wheel of a Hyundai i20 car, shattered the confidence the city had gained from 14 years without terror — the last incident was the 2011 Delhi High Court bombing.
Reporters on their toes
This is an account of how ThePrint covered a terror attack right beneath our noses.
As it happened, its principal crime and security reporters, Bismee Taskin and Special Correspondent Mayank Kumar, were elsewhere — at home. Taskin had just returned from leave and Kumar from covering the police raids in Faridabad that uncovered the doctors’ terror cell and 2,900 kg of explosives.
But, nothing was going to keep them away from the crime scene. Taskin reached there around 8:30 pm and Kumar at about 10 pm. Bisht was already climbing up a building in the adjacent Lajpat Rai market to capture the entire blast site.
Other correspondents like Samridhi Tewari, Shubhangi Misra, and Triya Gulati had also arrived at the Red Fort site for on-the-spot eyewitness reports, with some stationed outside the Lok Nayak Hospital to report on the injured.
With the major aspects of the immediate incident covered, the six reporters on the ground set about sending back stories as the smoke from the debris lifted and a clearer picture of the site emerged.
Reporters, editors, and the copy editing team didn’t sleep much as stories at ThePrint were published till 3 am the next morning, said Nisheeth Upadhyay, Editor (Operations). Most were up and on the job by 6 am to understand what exactly had happened the night before and the sequence of events which had led up to it.
Many questions
Who was Umar Nabi? Did he detonate the explosives intentionally or accidentally? Why and where did he obtain them? Was he a lone wolf?
These were the first of many questions that needed answers. Here was a terror plot which began in Srinagar mid-October and wound its way to a halt in Old Delhi on 10 November.
As of now, 15 people have died and 30 sustained injuries in the car explosion. About 2,900 kg of explosives, along with guns, have been recovered from two houses in Faridabad. The four prime accused have been identified as Dr Muzammil Shakeel Ganai, Dr Adeel Ahmed Rather, and Mufti Irfan Ahmad Wagay from Jammu and Kashmir, and Dr Shaheen Saeed from Lucknow.
ThePrint pursued two different but converging lines of coverage: the first was to find out everything we could about the immediate explosion and the people involved in it.
The second was to discover the antecedents of the terror plot that took us back to J&K, where it all began.
ThePrint’s Contributing Editor Praveen Swami, with years of experience in reporting on insurgencies and national security, and correspondents Bismee Taskin and Mayank Kumar were at the beating heart of the story while others like Senior Associate Editor Ananya Bhardwaj and Assistant Editor Fareeha Ifthikar joined in for special reports.
That brings us to the copy editing team. They are the unseen and unsung stars of all reporting efforts, who diligently worked in the background to clean up copies and ensure that the information was accurate, fair, and verified before publication.
For journalists, the task has been daunting because it’s a ‘white collar’ terror module, that too of doctors. Little or nothing was known about them, little and much less of their backgrounds. Equally confusing were the multiple strands of the terror web that had to be drawn into a coherent narrative for the average reader.
“It’s been very confusing. We have been acutely conscious that a year down the road, there could be a very different point of view on the story,’’ admitted Praveen Swami. “We are not investigators — we are taking a stab at reporting what we can find out. It’s difficult to be certain of it all. The challenge is how to tell readers a story that is still ambiguous, with confidence that what we say is true. Many questions remain. How often can we use ‘allegedly’, ‘reportedly’, ‘according to sources’ in our reports? We hope the informed reader understands this”.
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Chasing different angles
‘Be prepared’. That’s an old motto we learned when we were young.
That’s what helped everyone in the newsroom to spring into action on Monday evening. They were well-prepared. Since April 2025, a series of violent crises had demanded immediate on-the-spot reporting and in–depth stories.
The Pahalgam terror attack on 22 April had killed 26 people, mostly civilians. Operation Sindoor in early May saw cross-border attacks by India and Pakistan. And, on 12 June, Air India’s Flight 171 crashed soon after takeoff at Ahmedabad airport, killing over 270 people.
ThePrint had covered all of these hands on, in real time.
“A drill has to be in place for such incidents, you have to be sure that every bit of information put out is in order,” said Nisheeth Upadhyay. “The drill comes handy at a time like this’’.
The car explosion, though unexpected, did not come as a surprise either. That’s a contradiction, but it’s true. Monday’s news cycle from early morning had been dominated by the Jammu and Kashmir-Faridabad police forces’ joint raids in Faridabad which saw the arrest of one doctor and the discovery of the explosives.
“The explosives were found in the morning and in the evening, there’s a car explosion — too much of a coincidence may not just be a coincidence,’’ said Upadhyay. With that in mind, the reporters were looking for clues at the site.
Bismee Taskin said she spoke to everyone she could find at the site: police, fire officials, bystanders, eyewitnesses.
“There was confusion all around,” said Taskin, “The lack of a road crater, shrapnel and nails suggested it wasn’t a terror attack. Even the security agencies didn’t know.’’
Taskin, Mayank Kumar — and Ananya Bhardwaj working on her phone from home — verified that the security agencies were treating this as a terror attack.
But they waited for official confirmation. Kumar said a Delhi Police FIR was filed at about 12:30 am citing sections of UAPA. “That was when we were 100 per cent sure.’’
ThePrint ran that story at about 1 am on 11 November.
From then onward, Taskin said they were “chasing” different angles of the incident: Dr Nabi’s identity and background, the ownership of the i20 vehicle, the origin of the ammonia nitrate — and to establish whether this was a suicide terror attack.
Bit by bit, the reporters pieced together the jigsaw. Both Taskin and Kumar said that the terror module and the car explosion were being investigated by different central and state security agencies which made it more confusing and but also easier to receive information.
For instance, the National Security Guard (NSG) collected the primary onsite evidence; then the National Investigation Agency (NIA) took over the case; the Delhi Police is conducting a criminal conspiracy inquiry into the car explosion, while the Jammu and Kashmir Police is pursuing local links of all those involved in the posters that emerged in Srinagar before the explosion —and in the storage of explosives and guns. They are being assisted by the Faridabad Police. Then, the police in Uttar Pradesh have been probing Dr Shaheen angle while the Enforcement Directorate looks into Al Falah University where the doctors had been working.
Confused? You ought to be.
Taskin said one police officer or another would share something. “It wasn’t so tough to get basic information.”
“There are a lot of stakeholders and local police tend to speak more,’’ added Kumar, “I remember one of them said, ‘Ek video aaya hai’ and we followed up.”
But he added that there was also a lot of “random information’’. Taskin and Kumar said they waited till they could verify information with several authoritative sources before putting out stories.
It’s difficult to list all the stories they did, so here are links to some of the more important ones related to the blast, to the car, and to the movements of Dr Nabi by Taskin as well. The stories also cover several videos related to the blast making the rounds and how Dr Nabi switched off his mobile phone to avoid police detection.
Mayank Kumar, who covers crime, security, and investigative agencies, also tracked different angles of the i20 car ownership, an unseen video on “suicide martyrdom”, the involvement of another doctor, and the Enforcement Directorate’s actions against Al Falah University in Faridabad. He also did a story on how and where the explosives in the car were assembled.
Kumar said when there were so many sources of information, things were sometimes “blown out of proportion’’. For example, Dr Shaheen has been described as the head of the women’s wing of Jaish-e-Mohammad in some sections of the media. “All that we know is that she was present at meetings and funded Dr Muzameel. No more.”
The challenge
Praveen Swami’s in-depth knowledge of insurgencies and terrorism helped ThePrint probe deeper into the alleged doctor terror cell in Kashmir. If you listen to Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta and Swami on this episode of Cut the Clutter, you get a very good perspective on the car blast, those behind it, and the security forces’ alert actions.
Thereafter, Swami travelled to Jammu and Kashmir to trace back the origins of the terror module and its ideological underpinnings. “I miss reporting on a regular basis,’’ he said.
In these stories and one opinion piece, Swami profiled some of the key players, joined the dots of their association, and explained how educated individuals are drawn to terrorism, reminding us that Osama bin Laden was an engineer and that earlier too doctors have resorted to violent means to express their protest or anger.
The pieces give you the geography and the history along with the personal histories of Irfan Ahmad Wagay, a Srinagar cleric at the centre of the plot, and Muzaffar Ahmad Rather, brother of Dr Adeel Rather and a key accused who secretly fled to Afghanistan, reportedly to coordinate on bomb-making.
Swami said his sources in the intelligence and security agencies “usually tell me what they think happened…’’
“How to convey the information to the reader in a way that seems credible but also suggests that look, this is what we know so far, is a challenge.’’
He also pointed to a dilemma journalists face in such situations. Normally, journalists are cautioned to get all sides of a story and speak to all stakeholders to present a balanced report.
However, in this instance and others, the families of those arrested, detained or suspected to be involved in the terror module are not always willing to speak. “So how do we report it? Also, you can get so many different views, it’s difficult to be certain of the information you have,” said Swami.
The Delhi car blast coverage has highlighted occupational perils we face in our profession on a daily basis, and it is a valuable reminder that journalism is not easy. Nobody ever said it was.
Shailaja Bajpai is ThePrint’s Readers’ Editor. Please write in with your views and complaints to readers.editor@theprint.in
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)