Silchar, March 23: Mizoram police busted a gang of international arms smugglers after arresting a Chin tribal from Myanmar who was on his way to deliver rocket launchers to militants in the Northeast.
The police in Aizawl said the kingpin of the racket, Khatsi Anpao, 43, was apprehended from an Aizawl-bound bus coming from Champhai town on Mizoram’s border with Myanmar on Saturday morning.
He was carrying a bag which was stacked with the five high-power rocket launchers.
Anpao’s interrogation led to the arrest of three more members of the gang, identified as Jesuma, Liana and Mongia, from Champhai, sources said. All four are based at Tiddim in northwest Myanmar.
The police suspect that the arms were being taken to Cachar district in south Assam en route to the adjoining North Cachar Hills district, a beehive of insurgency since the early nineties.
In another development, Cachar police apprehended two cadres of the Dima Halam Daogah (Jewel Gorlosa) who told interrogators that they had been sent to the district to procure arms for the outfit. The two have been identified as Mono Naiding, 21, and M. Marak, 26.
The police here are trying to find out if the DHD (J) activists were sent to pick up the rocket launchers which the police suspect would have been taken to Cachar district via National Highway 54, the gateway to Mizoram from Cachar, by the Myanmarese arms peddlers.
This is the second arms haul in Mizoram involving Chin traffickers.
The police had seized a consignment of AK-47 rifles and ammunition during a raid at Siphir town near Aizawl on June 26 last year.
They had arrested at least three persons, including an arms dealer and druglord, Lal Liana, 41, a resident of Tiddim town in Chin hills in Myanmar, in this connection.
A cache of 26 rocket launchers were also recovered from the suitcases of the three arms merchants when the police carried out raids on a Tata 707 convertible and a bus at Vairengte on the Mizoram-Assam boundary on June 28 last year.