Six persons, including two officers of the Rifle Factory at Ishapore in North 24 Paraganas, were arrested by the Kolkata police for allegedly supplying arms, smuggled out of the factory, to Maoists in Bihar.
The factory comes under the Ministry of Defence.
While four of the accused were arrested at Babughat in the city on Sunday, the two employees were arrested at Ishapore. The police have seized 60 revolvers, a carbine and 10 cartridges from them.
“At 4 p.m. on Sunday, we arrested four persons at Babughat: Ajay Kumar Pandey, 40, Jayshankar Pandey, 36, Umesh Rey, 21, and Kartik Shaw 40. During interrogation, Umesh and Kartik disclosed that they got the arms with the help of Sukhda Murmu, 48, and Susanta Basu, 48, of the Rifle Factory,” Murlidhar Sharma, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Special Task Force), told journalists on Monday.
He said Murmu and Basu told the police that they were working as junior works managers. While Ajay Kumar and Jayshankar are residents of Nawada district in Bihar, Umesh and Kartik hail from Ishapore.
Uddipan Mukherjee, Public Relations Officer of the Ordinance Factory Board, confirmed that Murmu and Basu were employees of the Rifle Factory. “At this point we can only say that Murmu and Basu are employees of the Rifle Factory, Ishapore, and hold the post of junior works manager. They are Group B Gazetted Officers. We need inputs from the STF to make further comments,” he told The Hindu .
Mr. Sharma said the accused would smuggle out defective and rejected arms from the factory and repair them before selling them to Maoists and other miscreants in Bihar. “Ajay Kumar and Jayshankar admitted that they had earlier smuggled 16 INSAS rifles and four self-loading rifles from the Rifle Factory and sold them to Maoists in Bihar. We are also probing whether they sold the arms in Nepal too,” he said.
The arms were also sold to the underworld and a group called Tritia Prastuti Committee (a Naxalite group) in Bihar, he said.
The accused were produced before the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate and remanded in police custody till May 19.
However, the lawyers of the Rifle Factory employees argued that the police arrested them only on the basis of the claims made by the other accused. “We argued before the court that... the police have not been able to produce any direct evidence against them,” Sandip Mondal, one of their lawyers, said.
