The ISI has managed to facilitate a vicious Peshawar-Munger-Malda-Dhaka axis of sorts whereby it is not only recruiting and exporting terrorists but also getting notorious Pakistan-based gun manufacturers to enter the Indian borders and train the local criminals.
The NIA and Special Task Force of Kolkata Police have stumbled upon facts as to how the ISI invoked the members of a tribal community of Peshwar-Kohat region to train Munger-based gunsmiths who manufactured AK-22 rifles at workshops in Malda before exporting them to Bangladesh to launch the Dhaka Bakery attacks that claimed 22 lives.
The NIA has also stumbled upon facts showing how the Pakistani agency helped Bangladesh terror group Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) to recruit about 2,000 terrorists from Bengal in the past a few years.
The NIA is known to have received similar inputs from Bangladesh-based Counter-Terrorism and Transnational Crimes which alerted the Indian Intelligence agency about how the Dhaka Bakery guns were routed through Bengal. “We learnt this during our investigation of Gulshan attack,” and the information was shared with the NIA a top CTTC functionary said not ruling ISI hand in the entire network.
Subsequent investigation by the NIA revealed that members from a tribal community from Derra Adam Khel-from Peshawar-Kohat region-expert in imitating sophisticated guns were imported from that region to Malda where they trained the Munger gunsmiths who were also brought in from Bihar.
After manufacture, the guns were sent across the border through Champainawabganj border in mango baskets. The Pakistani trainers are so expert in their trade that they can “ditto a sophisticated gun in a week’s time.” In fact the Bihar Police which informed about the Pakistan link of the Munger gunsmiths have confirmed to their Bengal counterparts about the genuineness of reports that manufacturers from Munger had indeed set up workshops in many places in Bengal and were manufacturing guns.
The revelations seem to have alarmed the officials of both Bengal and Kolkata Police. This particularly after the police busted networks of arms manufacturers in and around Kolkata and Howrah in the recent past.
The police have seized huge amounts of arms and ammunition including pistols and cartridges from workshops with clear imprint of Kolkata-Munger camaraderie. The police have busted gun factories in Sonarpur, Maheshtala in South 24 Parganas. Similar workshops have been found in North 24 Parganas, Howrah and even proper Kolkata also.
While Munger as a common thread joins the gun factories of Malda, Kolkata and even Birbhum officials are now trying to investigate whether there are terror any links, insiders said.
Meanwhile, apart from pushing in gunsmiths the ISI-JMB network has recruited not less than 2,000 terror moles in Bengal, NIA sources have revealed. These terrorists were indoctrinated in the past 5-6 years before being recruited to their fold, sources said adding these terrorists were drawn from youth in Malda, Murshidabad, Nadia and Birbhum districts.
JMB’s terror network was busted and many of their leaders arrested after an accidental bomb blast inside a Khagragarh in Burdwan district in 2014 when the terrorists were manufacturing bombs to be exported to Bangladesh where the group would carry out subversive activities in that country.