Six held for smuggling arms from ordnance factory to Maoists

Acting on a tip off, officials of the Special Task Force (STF) arrested six persons including two employees of Ichhapur Rifle Factory on Monday for smuggling parts of arms, assembling those in Bihar and selling those to Maoists there. The arrests were made by the police’s Special Task Force (STF) and seven revolvers, one carbine and 10 rounds of ammunition were seized from them, police said.

Kolkata Police, Deputy Commissioner, STF, Murli Dhar said acting on a tip-off, a team laid a trap at the Babughat area, near the Hoogly river, last evening and caught four men with the arms.

The officer said the STF arrested alleged arms smugglers Ajay Kumar Pandey and Jayasankar Pandey from Bihar’s Nalanda district and Umesh Roy and Kartik Shaw of Ichchapur in West Bengal’s North-24 Parganas district. Dhar said after interrogation of Ajay and Jayasankar, STF sleuths arrested RFI junior works managers Sushanta Basu and Sukhda Murmu from their Nawapara residences in the North 24 Parganas district.

They were arrested late Sunday night for allegedly supplying the revolvers to them, he added. “Based on the information by our source about a possible arms deal in the city, we had laid a trap and arrested four people from the Babughat area Sunday evening,” Dhar said.

Preliminary investigation revealed that the arms were smuggled out of the Ichapur Rifle Factory with the help of its two officers, he said.

Elaborating on their modus operandi, the STF officer said the racket was probably active since 2008 and were supplying arms and ammunitions to Maoists in Bihar.