Lalbazar: Guns have been smuggled out of the Rifle Factory Ishapore as scrap for years and supplied to Maoists and the mafia in Bihar by a ring involving officials, police have revealed after an arms bust by the special task force.
Six persons, including two junior works managers of the factory, are in custody for their alleged collusion in the supply of INSAS assault rifles and SLRs manufactured in a government unit to rebels and goons.
Senior officers in the city police headquarters and the Ordinance Factory Board appeared stumped by the modus operandi and reach of the arms ring.
"Most of the smuggled rifles would be sold to Maoists and musclemen in Bihar. We have information that some arms went to members of the Tritiya Prastuti Committee, a splinter group of the CPI (Maoist)," said Muralidhar Sharma, deputy commissioner of police in charge of the task force. "Arms were possibly also sold in Nepal. We are trying to find out more about that."
Four of the accused were arrested on Sunday afternoon in Babughat, where they had assembled to allegedly hand over a consignment of smuggled arms to someone. Ajay Pandit, Jay Shankar, Kartik Shaw and Umesh Ray were traced to their meeting place on the basis of a tip-off, the police said.
Seven revolvers, a carbine and 10 rounds of ammunition were seized from them.
An officer involved in the investigation said the accused had confessed to smuggling out 16 INSAS rifles and four SLRs from the Rifle Factory Ishapore, 29km north of Calcutta.
Ajay, alias Guddu, is from Nalanda in Bihar and has been identified as one of the main operatives of the arms ring. Jay, a close associate, is from the same state.
Kartick and Umesh hail from Ishapore and their official link with the rifle factory is as contractors.
According to the police, Kartick and Umesh would allegedly coordinate with the arrested junior works managers - Sukhoda Murmu, alias Munmun, and Sushanta Basu, alias Basuda - to identify arms dumped as scrap within the factory premises and smuggle these out.
"Sukhoda and Sushanta were responsible for stock verification and had easy access to the stock yard of the factory," said a senior officer of the Ordinance Factory Board.
"Some of the arms discarded as scrap would be picked up and sold after refurbishment. All this was being done in Ajay's den in Bodh Gaya, Bihar. A refurbished SLR fetched a price of Rs 2-3 lakh," an officer said.
Most of the arms were smuggled out through a broken portion of the factory's boundary wall, the police said.
Ajay had apparently been controlling the ring since 2008 and is said to have built a fortune. He had been arrested in Bihar in early 2011 but got bail and shifted base from Nalanda to Bodh Gaya.
The special task force had been on the lookout for Ajay and his alleged collaborators since the arrest of a factory employee named Sambhu Bhattacharjee along with Deepak Shaw, an arms dealer, last September.
