Police and fire service divers reportedly recovered a huge cache of firearms and ammunition from a canal in the capital’s Turag Saturday evening.
The recovered arms included 97 pistols, 419 magazines of pistol and sub-machine gun, 1,060 bullets and 10 bayonets, officials said.
The weapons were allegedly dumped by a group of people arriving at the canal on of unregistered vehicle in the afternoon.
The glock pistols of 7.62 bore, and bullets of the pistol and SMG, were intact and in good condition. These were kept in eight travel bags on the canal bed, police said.
‘Acting on a tip-off, the Turag police and fire service divers recovered the arms and ammunition from the bed of the Diya Bari canal Saturday evening,’ said Uttara police division deputy commissioner Bidhan Tripura.
‘We had intelligence that a huge amount of arms and ammunition were brought at the canal by a car at about 4pm,’ he said.
‘Later, we started to search the bed of the canal and found the arms,’ Bidhan said.
The live canal, about 15-feet deep, is located in a deserted area of Diya Bari where a new housing project of Rajuk is going on. It borders Ashulia river embankment.
Fire service divers of Uttara and Tongi stations started the search after Turag police called them at about 5pm, said Fire Service inspector Mahmudul Hasan.
Dhaka Metropolitan Police deputy commissioner (media) Masudur Rahman told New Age that a black car, without a number plate, parked at the spot sometime between 3:30pm and 4pm. Four to five young men dropped the ‘material’ at the canal and left.
The arms recovery comes a day after the police finished off a weeklong countrywide anti-militant crackdown, which began after a top counterterrorism police officer’s wife was murdered in the port city of Chittagong, on the back of a series of targeted killings of liberal professors, writers, bloggers, publishers, minorities of Hindu, Christian, Buddhist and Muslim Shia, Sufi and Ahmadiyya denominations, and foreigners living in the country.
Around 200 militant suspects and over 12,000 people were arrested during the special crackdown, police headquarters said.
The police said it was not sure about who dropped the arms and ammunition at the canal in Turag, bordering the capital Dhaka.
‘They might be local or part of an international group who planned to carry out massive subversive activities in the capital,’ Bidhan said.
The arms were, however, not brought before journalists.
Asked about when and where the arms were removed from the canal site, Bidhan told New Age the arms and ammunition were shipped off before the newsmen arrived. ‘I don’t want to tell where these have been kept’, he said.
Bidhan said the search was postponed for the day. The search will continue on Sunday.
Source: New Age
