Bengal cops seize 11k gelatin sticks and 50k detonators

The Birbhum district police on Monday night seized 11,000 gelatin sticks, 50,000 detonators and a huge quantity of ammonium nitrate from Bahadurpur village in the Nalhati area. The seizure was made not far from the Jharkhand border.

There are many stone quarries in the region and it is suspected that the explosives were siphoned from official stocks of one or more of these quarries.

Monday night’s seizure came less than a week of the Murshidabad police seized 98 kg of bombmaking chemicals that was allegedly being sent to a banned militant outfit in Bangladesh. Two persons arrested in connection with the seizure —Manglu Khan and Sadekul Khan — told police the explosives were smuggled in from Jharkhand.

“These explosives (from Monday’s seizure) too were brought into Bengal from Jharkhand. We have arrested Angur Seikh who had hidden these inside his house,” an officer of the raiding team in Birbhum said on condition of anonymity.

“We are trying to find out from where the explosives had been brought in and why,” said N Sudheer Kumar, superintendent of Birbhum district police.

Gelatin sticks and detonators, have earlier been seized from Maoists and terror outfits.

About two weeks ago, Birbhum police seized around 15 quintal gelatin sticks, 500 detonators and ammonium nitrate from Rampurhat. In February this year, around 18,000 detonators, 8,000 gelatin sticks and 100 kg ammonium nitrate was seized in the district’s Muhhamadbazar area. Both places are not far from the Bengal-Jharkhand border.

In October 2014, an explosion at Khagragarh in which two persons died led to the discovery of a flourishing improvised explosive device making factory and a terror racket in Bengal run mainly by members of Jamaatul-Mujahideen (JMB).

KOUSHIK DUTTA

KOLKATA: