Three men were arrested with 26 pistols, 19 magazines and 800 cartridges from Usmanpur area of northeast Delhi, the police said on Wednesday, 27 June.
Saleem (47), Naseem (35) and Saizan (23), all residents of Jaffrabad in northeast Delhi, were arrested last evening, said Deputy Commissioner of Police (northeast) Atul Kumar Thakur.
Saleem already has eight criminal cases, including a case of murder, registered against him, the officer added.
Not so long ago, another case of smuggling came to light in Delhi on 29 May, 2018, with similar travesty.
Delhi police nabbed two arms smugglers and seized 27 semiautomatic country-made pistols and one revolver from them on the night of 29 May. Ram Gopal Naik, the DCP of crime branch, said that the quality and accuracy of the seized weapons is quite high.
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The accused, who were arrested from a park in Sarai Kale Khan, confessed that they had come to the Capital to deliver guns to local criminals who need weapons for petty crimes.
“The accused, identified as Salamudin, a native of Mathura, and Bhagat Singh from Bharatpur Rajasthan, had good contacts with Delhi’s local criminals. They wanted to individually sell off the guns to them and had asked them to come to the Millennium Park near Sarai Kale Khan to pick them up,” Naik told Mail Today.
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“We received a tip-off about an illegal arms deal at the park and subsequently a trap was laid down. The accused came to the park around midnight and were nabbed,” Naik added.
The accused told police about the smuggling of arms from Madhya Pradesh’s Burhanpur district. An officer said that an open arms manufacturing factory is located in a deep forest some 150 km from the state’s district headquarters.
The accused used to carry the smuggled arms via road and rail routes till the Delhi border and entered the city using bus or taxi.
“They used to buy guns for about Rs 7,000 to Rs 8,000 per unit and sell them in Delhi for Rs 25,000 to 30,000,” Naik said.
On Friday, 8 June, two gunrunners were arrested and 31 countrymade pistols seized from them, which they intended to supply to criminals in the National Capital Region-Delhi, police said.
Mohammad Azam Saifi, 52, and his accomplice Akbar, 28, are natives of Uttar Pradesh’s Meerut, and were arrested during raids in Delhi and Meerut on Tuesday and Thursday.
“Akbar was arrested on a tip-off on Tuesday when he visited east Delhi’s Loni flyover area to deliver a consignment of illegal firearms to a contact Akram. Akbar was asked to surrender but he pulled out a pistol in a bid to escape but was overpowered,” Deputy Commissioner of Police Sanjeev Kumar Yadav said.
As many as 24 more pistols concealed in a cloth were seized from him.
“Akbar told police that he worked as a courier for a gang led by Saifi who, he said, was a blacksmith and manufactured illegal firearms at his Meerut residence. Police raided Azam’s residence and arrested him,” Yadav said.
Six countrymade pistols along with a drilling machine and tools used in the manufacture of illegal firearms were seized from Saifi.
The extensive demand and supply of arms and ammunition illegally bring to the fore the matter of human safety and increasingly violent behavior. Only those that are nabbed are not the ones that need to be admonished but also those that make it back and forth, undetected.