Recovery of 11 country-made bombs from a garbage bin at Anna Nagar in November, 2014, kept the city police on their toes for days till all the accused were put behind bars.
For, the police feared that any slackness could lead to a brutal gang war.
However, what went unnoticed in 2014 is that Madurai city and district police stumbled upon country-made guns in at least four cases.
A farmer from Chathirapatti who was robbed of gold and cash at knife-point by a masked gang on December 8 complained that one of them carried a gun.
In mid-December, the district police recovered a country-made revolver when they picked up a murder accused, G. Saravanan, at Samayanallur.
Police sources said that Saravanan had got the gun from another accused, whom he had befriended in the jail. He is said to have confessed that the firearm had been brought from Rameswaram.
In another incident, a team of South Gate police was shocked when an accused, ‘Pottal’ Pandi, pulled out a country-made pistol and threatened them when they went to execute arrest warrants pending against him at a village in Virudhunagar district.
The accused had reportedly confessed to have carried the weapon to take revenge for an attack on his friend in Virudhunagar district.
Though arrests meant that the police prevented a murder or a robbery, what is baffling is that the police could not get into the bottom of the issue – finding the source of the illegal weapons.
“On many occasions in the past, the accused escaped by claiming that they had got the weapon from another criminal who would have been dead,” a police officer said.
In crime cases, the police are satisfied with recovery of booty and often fail to pursue the source of the weapons, as in the case of recovery of a gun from two north Indian youths, who robbed a jeweller in South Avani Moola Street in May, a source said.
