Grenade info sought from ordnance units

A day after two hand grenades and other ammunition were found in the toilet of a locked house in Sector 31, police on Wednesday wrote to the defence headquarters in Delhi and three ordnance factories in the country seeking details of the munitions

A day after two hand grenades and other ammunition were found in the toilet of a locked house in Sector 31, police on Wednesday wrote to the defence headquarters in Delhi and three ordnance factories in the country seeking details of the munitions.

Gurugram, India – March 1, 2022: Investigation underway outside an empty plot where reportedly few hand grenades and live cartridges were found, in Sector 31, Gurugram, India, on Tuesday, March 01, 2022. (Photo by Vipin Kumar/ Hindustan Times) (Vipin Kumar/HT PHOTO)

Besides the two grenades, two polythene bags, one filled with 15 MK 90 practice grenades used by recruits of the Indian army during practice session, and another with one bicat strip (practice munitions comprising a safety fuse inserted with crackers which simulate automatic gunfire when ignited — used to mislead enemy during a war) and 43 empty cartridges of a long-range automatic weapon were recovered from the toilet.

The police teams, with the help of labourers, dug a 7-foot-deep trench and covered it with sandbags to defuse the grenades during a six-hour-long operation on Tuesday. The bomb disposal team successfully defused the grenades, the practice grenades and the bicat strip, said police.

During the preliminary investigation, police said they found that some of the recovered ammunition was manufactured in an ordnance factory in Khamaria, Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh. Police are also seeking information from an ordnance factory in Muradnagar, Uttar Pradesh, which specialises in the kind of ammunition found in the locked house. “We have written to both factories to find out the batch details, the year of manufacture and sale. Once we receive these details, we will have more clarity about the buyer,” said a senior police officer associated with the investigation.

Police booked Ravinder Agarwal, a chartered accountant living in Delhi and one of the owners of the house where the ammunition was found, on Tuesday under relevant sections of the Explosive Substances Act, 1908. They said the house is jointly owned by three directors, including Agarwal, of a stockbroking group. “We have summoned the three directors. One of them is yet to join the investigation,” Yadav said.

Yadav said during questioning, the owners said they bought the plot in 2006-07 and constructed a house on 25% of the area in accordance with the rules of the Haryana Urban Development Authority (Huda). “The men visited the plot only once or twice after the construction. Agarwal had hired a caretaker, who was let go after he started inviting his friends to the house. The house did not have a guard or a caretaker for the last six years,” said the ACP. “Agarwal got the place cleaned last in 2019,” said Yadav, adding that the house has been locked since the first Covid-induced lockdown in 2020. The police said they plan to question the former caretaker as well.

The house is located near the compressed natural gas (CNG) station, where three employees were stabbed to death early Monday. Yadav said there is no connection between the triple murder case and the recovery of the ammunition from the locked house apart the fact that they were reported from the same area and cases were registered at Sector 40 police station. “The murders are not related to the ammunition recovery,” he said.

On Wednesday, Virender Vij, deputy commissioner of police (east), announced a reward of ₹1 lakh for credible information in the triple murder case.