Traders recall horror

"I was attending the customers in the evening when I heard a deafening sound. The glass windows of neighbouring houses were shattered. I rushed outside and saw people running here and there. They were shouting blast ho gaya ...blast ho gaya," recalls Sudhir Mishra who works in a garment shop in Sarojini Nagar.

The blast that rattled through the market on October 29, 2005 left a huge impact in the memories of hundreds of traders and shopkeepers who were witness to it in the busy Sarojini Nagar market in South Delhi from where maximum number of casualties were reported.

The blast occurred at a fruit juice corner on Dhanteras evening — a day before Diwali — when the market was flooded with customers. "We have listed all names of the martyrs in the Sarojini Nagar blast on a memorial wall to pay homage. It was horrific. We rushed to the spot to see bodies lying all around. It was difficult to differentiate between a male charred body and a female one," said Ashok Randhawa, president of Mini Market Association of Sarojini Nagar.

Prem Goyal, who runs his garment shop just next to the blast site, says he was lucky to have survived the blast.

"The boy in the fruit juice corner noticed the bag first. He alerted his owner Lal Chand who tried to dispose it off to a safe place after they saw wires attached to a cooker inside the bag. It exploded as he moved away from our shop. My shop was burnt with the impact."

The attendants in his shop also recall the horror and say that before the police arrived, they tried to help the injured.

"It all happened within seconds. All we did was to get out of our shop and try help the injured. It was a horrific scene to see the torn body parts spread all across the ground. We hope justice would prevail," says Sushil, an attendant in the garment shop.

As the court pronounces its verdict on Thursday in the October 2005 Delhi serial blast case, victims and the families of the dead await justice.