Municipal man arms key

The kingpin of the racket that had procured the huge quantity of arms and ammunition seized from a Baguiati house on Republic Day-eve was a Group D employee of Rajarhat-Gopalpur municipality, police said on Tuesday.
Nimai Das — who joined the civic body four years ago and drew a monthly salary of Rs 3,300 — had allegedly spent around Rs 20 lakh to pick up the consignment from Allahabad.
He has been absconding since the arrest of seven suspected gun-runners in Malda early on Sunday, which led to the arms haul in the city.
On Sunday night, a team from the CID’s Special Operations Group (SOG) had seized 7,000 rounds of bullets, 12 firearms and a bullet-proof jacket in a ground-floor room of a three-storey house in Baguiati owned by Anupam Chowdhury.
Among the weapons seized were three pen-pistols, sophisticated firearms which a senior CID official said were not manufactured in any ordnance factory in the country.
Chowdhury, a wholesaler dealing in fish and textiles, was arrested on Sunday. He told the police that he knew nothing about the consignment seized from his house.
The sleuths said Das connected with Chowdhury while buying fish fingerlings from him.
“Das used to bring arms and ammunition from Allahabad in a Scorpio. The same car was used to deliver them to clients,” said an SOG official.
“We raided Das’s Rajarhat house on Sunday but he was not there,” the official added. The cops are in touch with the municipal authorities for more details about Das.
Civic chairman Tapas Chatterjee said Das had joined service four years ago as a casual employee. “He was posted in the water supply division. His salary is Rs 3,300. We are trying to get his whereabouts. If we come across any clues, we will pass them on to the CID.”
Das’s financial status changed soon after he joined the municipality. “In a short while he became rich enough to lend money,” said an official investigating the case.
“We are also looking for a middleman who had helped Ashok Mandal, a key operative of the racket and among the seven arrested in Malda, contact Maoists in Nandigram to sell arms,” said S.N. Gupta, the deputy inspector-general (operations) of the CID.
Mandal and his associates, the officials added, also supplied arms to Naxalites in Chhattisgarh.
Following a tip-off, a CID team raided a government guest house in Malda’s Harishchandrapur early on Sunday and arrested the seven men, who had gone there from the Baguiati-Rajarhat area allegedly to settle an arms deal.
An investigation revealed that the accused had booked two rooms in the guest house with the help of an employee in the office of the Block Development Officer of Harishchandrapur II.
The statements of the gang of seven led the sleuths to Chowdhury’s house in Baguiati, where the cache of arms and ammunition was found in an almirah