'Guns used in Jama Masjid attack came from Bihar'

Arms of the country-made variety are not only flooding the capital's underground market but also having allegedly been used by home-grown terror outfit Indian Mujahideen (IM) cadre on two separate occasions recently, Jatin Anand and Karn Pratap Singh reports.

Interstate boundaries are increasingly getting blurred as the Delhi Police tries to stall illegal arms from falling into terrorists' hands.

HT Image

Arms of the country-made variety are not only flooding the Capital's underground market but also having allegedly been used by home-grown terror outfit Indian Mujahideen (IM) cadre on two separate occasions recently.

"There are several Delhi Police teams, tasked with clamping down on the interstate smuggling of country-made arms, currently camping in Bihar's Munger district - where a majority of these weapons seem to be sourced from," Delhi Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar told Hindustan Times.

According to a 26-page chargesheet filed by the Special Cell in the court of chief metropolitan magistrate Vinod Yadav on May 19, two country-made pistols, procured from Bihar, were used to spray bullets on a Taiwanese film crew at north Delhi's Jama Masjid on September 19, 2010 - the second anniversary of the Batla House encounter.

The pistols, sources claimed, were procured from Bihar's Munger district given its reputation of producing 'good quality country-made weapons owing to its proximity to several ordnance factories in the area'.

This year, the Special Cell allegedly recovered two Munger-sourced pistols of .32 calibre, magazines, cartridges and other weapons to be used in the engineering of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) from the rented accommodation of Langde Irfan, one of the men who allegedly executed serial blasts at Pune this August.

"After being procured, such arms are typically smuggled into the NCR aboard trains and finally sold to any willing buyer(s) in the city," the Commissioner said.

Among these methods to smuggle such arms are using female carriers, using cavities in large books as well as specially-made suitcases with false secret craters, etc to hide and transport country-made arms on Delhi-bound trains.

"We are in touch with our counterparts in Bihar, the Railway Protection Force (RPF) and the Government Railway Police (GRP) to stall their movement," Kumar added.