STF raids houses of arrested persons

Kolkata: The Special Task Force (STF) of the Kolkata Police conducted raids at the houses of those arrested in connection with smuggling of firearms from Rifle Factory Ishapore to the Maoists.

The search operations at the houses at Ishapore in North 24-Parganas were conducted on Thursday. It may be recalled that police had arrested six persons in this connection on May 7. Out of the six arrested persons Ajay Kumar Pandey, alias Guddu Pandit, and Jaysankar Pandey are residents of Bihar while Susanta Basu (51), alias Basuda, is a resident of Majherpara in Ishapore, Sukhda Murmu (48), alias Munmun, is from Nawabganj near Noapara in Ishapore, Kartik Shaw (40) of Noapara and Umesh Ray (21) is also a resident of Noapara. Separate teams of the STF conducted raids at the houses of all the four persons. The raid continued for a few hours and police have also questioned their family members while it was on. Police have also questioned family members of Susanta and Sukhda, who used to work at the rifle factory as junior managers.

It may be recalled that investigation had revealed that the arrested persons from Ishapore used to take scrap firearms out of the factory and the same used to get sold to the Maoists after necessary repairing. After taking out the scrap firearms from the factory, they used to hand it over to their counterparts from Bihar. The arrests came on Monday when they had assembled for a deal of firearms was at Babughat.

While speaking to the family members of the arrested persons during the search operation, police wanted to know whether they often visited Bihar or any other parts of the country. This comes at the time when a team of the STF officers has already gone to Bihar and are further probing into the incident.