Illegal arms unit busted in Katraj

PUNE, May 7: In a major swoop, the Sahakarnagar police today bust an illegal weapons factory located in a garage at Katraj, off the Pune Sa...

PUNE, May 7: In a major swoop, the Sahakarnagar police today bust an illegal weapons factory located in a garage at Katraj, off the Pune Satara road, and arrested five persons engaged in manufacturing country-made revolvers.

The accused include Dhananjay Chandrakant Naik (27) and his 26-year-old brother Mahindra and three craftsmen from Uttar Pradesh whom they had employed to manufacture the weapons illegally.

None of the other garage employees at the Naik brother’s Trimurthy Garage in Morebaug area of Katraj had any idea that the three craftsmen — Radheshyam Ramsajitan Varma, Santosh Kumar Yadav Singh Yadav and Bhimsen Ramsen Yadav were illegally assembling weapons. The garage was opened at an isolated place, around 300 meters away from the Pune-Satara road, by Naik’s father who is a resident of Guruwar Peth. Various kinds of trucks are repaired in the garage.

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Following the retirement of their father three years ago, the Naik brothers started looking after the garage. Bhimsen has been working with the garage as a watchman ever since, police said.

Around two months back, Dhananjay Naik had asked Bhimsen if the latter knew anybody manufacturing the weapons illegally. Bhimsen then brought Radheshyam and Santosh Kumar to Pune from their native place in Banda district of Uttar Pradesh around a month back.

Both of them were employed as carpenters by the Naik brothers and resided on the garage premises. They would manufacture the weapons using the tools in the garage after the seven other employees retired late in the night.

Radheshyam, who used to work as a carpenter at Banda, learnt the art of manufacturing the revolvers from a resident of Allahabad. He has been manufacturing weapons for the last five years. He would sell these weapons to various criminals in Uttar Pradesh at Rs 300 to Rs 400.

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A police patrol team, which noticed the machines at the garage late in the night a fortnight back, tipped off the Sahakarnagar police station in-charge Inspector R S Kondhalkar about the incident.

Kondhalkar kept the garage under surveillance for more than ten days and decided to conduct a raid after it was confirmed that an illegal weapons factory was being run in the garage.

The raid, led by Deputy Commissioner of Police Chandrakant Ughade, Inspector Kondhalkar and PSI V D Sonavane, started around 1.45 am yesterday. The work of searching the premises of the garage was on till late in the morning. In the afternoon, the suspects were produced before a magistrate who remanded them to two days of police custody.