Smuggling racket at govt arms unit busted, 6 held

KOLKATA: Cops have busted a 10-year-old racket in

smuggling

sophisticated weapons parts out of the

Rifle Factory

in Ishapore with the arrest of six persons, including two officers and two contract labourers working at the high-security defence establishment.

The arrests, coming barely seven months after another officer from the same establishment was arrested on similar charges last September, were “alarming”, senior police officials admitted. The seized weapons included one carbine, seven revolvers and several rounds of bullets, officials said, and they were assembled using parts smuggled out of the Ishapore factory.

The decade-old racket serviced Maoist outfits in India and, possibly, terror modules operating from Nepal, Kolkata Police’s Special Task Force officials said after arresting Ajay Pandit alias Guddu, Jayshankar Pandey, Umesh Roy alias Bhola and Kartik Sahu from Babughat on Sunday. Roy and Sahu, contracted workers at the Ishapore Rifle Factory, were passing on the consignment to Pandey and Pandit. Interrogation of the four led cops to two junior works managers of the defence establishment, Sukhada Murmu and Sushanta Basu, who were then arrested.

“The two arms dealers, Pandey and Pandit, seem to have been in touch with the works managers for quite some time. They used to procure arms via a middleman but, this time, they themselves came down to Kolkata from Bihar to get the arms,” STF deputy commissioner Murlidhar Sharma said on Monday. Officials said the same team had assembled and sold at least 16 INSAS and four self-loading rifles after getting out weapons parts from the Rifle Factory in the last two years.

Arms dealer Ajay Pandit also told interrogators that they had been getting arms from other Ordnance Factory Board establishments. These arms, he added, were sold mainly to Maoist outfits like the Tritiya Prastuti Committee in India and organisations in Nepal.

Sukhada Murmu and Sushanta Basu told interrogators that they would wait for arms parts that were found to be defective and were condemned.

The two works managers used to keep back some of these condemned parts, which were meant to be sold as scrap, and then help the two contracted workers sneak them out of the factory complex. These parts were then smuggled to Bihar, assembled and tested and then sold.

An OFB official confirmed to TOI that Murmu and Basu were junior works managers of the rank of group-D gazetted officers.

“We are aware of the development and are investigating,” an official said.

The nexus between a section of factory officials and workers and arms dealers came to light for the first time in September 2017 when works manager Shambhu Bhattacharjee was arrested by the STF. He had allegedly smuggled out parts of 7.62-mm self-loading rifles and 5.56-mm INSAS rifles, which were sold to illegal arms manufacturers. The STF, a few days before arresting Bhattacherjee, had picked up another contractual worker, Lalu, who was carrying a pistol assembled with condemned parts.

“Bhattacharjee had links with the two works managers arrested on Sunday,” a Lalbazar official said.

The CBI last October lodged a case of fraud against a cashier working in the same factory. Officials said they were probing whether there was any link between that arrest and the other arrests.