Gun shop owner held for cartridge sale to terror operatives

LUCKNOW : The state Anti Terror Squad (ATS) on Tuesday night arrested a gun house owner, Raghvendra Singh Chauhan from Kanpur, for allegedly supplying cartridges to terror operatives. ATS officials said Chauhan supplied over 700 cartridges to the UP-based self radicalised ISIS module operators in the past few months. The ATS zeroed in on Chauhan while tracing the network of the module.

Chauhan, who owns a shop LRS Arms and Ammunitionsin Kanpur’s Rail Bazar area, was under the scanner since the arrest of a retired IAF corporal, Ghaus Mohammed Khan, 56, the key operator and motivator of the ISIS module on March 9.

“We checked his shop on the details shared by ATS sleuths and found several anomalies in the stock and sale/purchase registers,” said Satish Kumar Singh, inspector of Rail Bazar police station. He said the cross-checking of registers showed that Chauhan purchased cartridges from two other gun houses, Khanna Gun House and Sewa Gun House, but did not enter the purchases in his shop’s stock register.

He said there were several discrepancies in the sale and purchase registers and they had been seized for further scanning.

Singh said Chauhan later confessed during interrogation that he got lured and sold the cartridges on increased prices without verifying the purchaser and did not maintain records. He said several fakes stamp pads of district magistrates, additional district magistrates, medical officers, gun houses and education institutes were also found in his shop. “Chauhan failed to explain what these stamp pads were used for . The ATS sleuths are quizzing him in the matter,” he added.

The module was exposed after a pipe bomb explosion on the Bhopal-Ujjain passenger train in Madhya Pradesh that injured nine people on the morning of March 7. So far, 10 people, including Chauhan, have been arrested from separate places while one person was gunned down in Lucknow. To recall, the intelligence and security agencies acted swiftly after the blast and six people were arrested in Madhya Pradesh and UP within a few hours on March 7. The operation head of the module, Saifullah Khan, was killed in a 13-hour encounter with UP ATS commandos in Thakurganj’s Haji Colony house in Lucknow on the intervening night of March 7/8. The house was reportedly used as the north India headquarters of the ISIS module. The ATS had recovered a huge cache of arms and ammunitions. At least 630 live cartridges that were purchased from Chauhan were also recovered from the house.