It was the second escape for cinema director N. Shankar, who had married just three days earlier at the Shalimar Function Palace in Nampally here. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary that cold Wednesday morning, yet by 11.50 a.m., a deafening blast turned Jubilee Hills into a scene of chaos.
A black cloud of smoke rose over the hillock at the edge of Jubilee Hills as debris and fire scattered across the road. In an instant, a quiet morning became a scene of horror, leaving onlookers stunned and roads littered with the aftermath of destruction.
Among those caught in the havoc was Sattiah, who was working on chiseling rock at Kondapur. āBy lunch time, the road and surrounding area were covered with legs, arms, burnt body parts, clumps of hair and the stench of flesh,ā he recalls, the memory still raw nearly three decades later. He still lives yards from the blast site.
Even today, visitors to the Writerās Room cafe pass by the spot without a second glance. āWas there a bomb blast here,ā asks a householder overseeing construction work near the spot.
The explosion, on November 19, 1997, triggered in a parked Premier Padmini CKM 646, killed nearly 25 persons and maimed dozens. The car had been purchased for ā¹30,000 that September from a car dealer in Karnataka.
Forensic investigation identified it as a remote-controlled device that was packed with 50 kg of gelatin sticks to assassinate then Anantapur MLA Paritala Ravindra. But the brunt of the blast was borne by a Commander jeep carrying six journalists from ETV who were capturing footage of actor Mohan Babu and Paritala Ravi in their vehicle. All six persons were killed as their vehicle flew into the air due to the impact just as it was overtaking the car in which Ravindra and Mohan Babu were travelling.
āOnly a fruit vendor of our locality was killed in the blast. Most others were visitors from Anantapur who had been brought in for the muhurat shot for N. Shankarās Sri Ramulayya at Rama Naidu Studios in Jubilee Hills,ā says Venkatesh, a stone-cutter who was in the vicinity on the day of the blast. The 1998 film was based on the life ofĀ Ravindraās father, Paritala Sriramulu.
Within hours of the blast, then Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu identified Ravindra as the intended target. The factional violence that had long plagued Rayalaseema area of Anantapur had now erupted in Hyderabad. The carnage did not end with the deaths of dozens of innocent people.
Initial investigations linked the explosion to the murder of S. Obul Reddy at Maheshwari Complex on July 23, 1996, with suspicions falling on former Congress MLA S.V. Ramana Reddy. However, tracing the ownership of the car eventually led investigators to factionist Gangula Suryanarayana Reddy, identified by car dealers as the person who inspected the vehicle and approved its purchase.
The government announced a reward of ā¹2 lakh, and later raised it to ā¹5 lakh, for information on Suryanarayana Reddy, his wife Bhanumathi, and two others, Lakshmi Reddy and Prabhakar Reddy. āA request to the general public to help in locating the alleged culprits involved in the Hyderabad Jubilee Hills Car Bomb Blast,ā read the announcement on November 30, 1997.
A week later, on December 7, Suryanarayana Reddy was arrested from Chitradurga in Karnataka. The story of Ravindra and the factional violence in Rayalaseema later reached cinema audiences: Sri Ramulayya, starring Mohan Babu and Soundarya, drew inspiration from these events. Ram Gopal Varmaās Rakta Charitra II, which released on December 3, 2010, opens with the Jubilee Hills explosion and traces Ravindraās life until his assassination just two days before Republic Day in 2005.
Suryanarayana Reddy, convicted for the bomb blast and later released from prison, was shot dead by his aide inside a car in Banjara Hills on January 4, 2011.
The string of killings, which began with the 1993 bomb attack on P. Siva Reddy, also known as Bombula Siva Reddy, near Satya Sai Nigamagamam on August 7, appeared to reach its grim conclusion with the death of Suryanarayana Reddy.
Published ā November 22, 2025 12:54 am IST
