Sleuths of Anti-Terrorists Squad (ATS) nabbed a second kingpin of the gang engaged in smuggling components of firearms from abroad and assembling them before selling them to criminals. Earlier on April 18 last, the ATS had nabbed four members of the gang and recovered arms in large quantity besides equipment and tools.
As per reports, the ATS acting on a tip-off managed to nab Elwin Deesa of Mumbai, whose name cropped up during quizzing of the earlier four. A retired Air India employee, Deesa is over 80-years of age but still is the pivot of the racket. Some foreign consignments were recovered from his possession which he had brought to deliver to his gang members.
Earlier the STF was getting inputs about some organized gang being active in UP, Bihar, Maharastra, Haryana, Punjab etc and were engaged in smuggling parts of foreign made arms from Singapore and Canada. The parts were later assembled and sold to criminals. They also bought used firearms, damaged them and embossed the number on the assembled hndguns before selling it off. For this the smugglers had link-ups with arms dealers.
The ATS developed the input and arrested Mohamed Khalid of Chowk from Chamrauli Inter College in Unnao on April 18. On his information, his three cronies- Zunaid Arshad aka Chote, Kallu Sharma and Vimal Kumar Vishwakarma were netted from Kanpur.
The police recovered three assembled pistol, a sample pistol of Berreta, four frames of pistol, arms licenses and other items in large quantity besides diagrams, photo albums, cash etc.
Khalid dislcosed that he was fascinated with foreign made handguns early on and came in contact with arms dealer in Kanpur through his uncle. He later came in contact with an arms dealer Anil Jain in Sirsa of Haryana. With Jain's help, he contacted Shivanandan Shetty, of Mumbai who used to smuggle parts of foreign guns for making a fast buck.
In cohorts with Shetty and Elwin Deesa, he started getting foreign parts and getting them assembled for supplying them to Ramzan and Qurban of Naubasta in Kanpur. The latter used to dispose the handguns through the National Gun House at latouche Road.
The gang had so far sold 160 weapons in several states. Khalid also said the money thus procured was channeled in real estate business in Gudamba and Wazirganj.