At the Gulbarga jail in Karnataka on January 3,a country-made version of a prohibited gun,a 9 mm semi-automatic pistol,typically associated with the Mumbai underworld,was found in the possession of an undertrial prisoner,Tadakal Ramesh. The Gulbarga police found the weapon had been sent into the prison as part of a plot in real-estate rivalry between two jailed cousins. Fellow prisoner Yusuf Khadri Bachkana,a Mumbai gangster associated with the Chhota Rajan gang and convicted of a murder in Bangalore,is alleged to have facilitated the supply. A Gulbarga police inspector,Rajkumar Bajantri,was arrested for allegedly involvement in the plan of one of the cousins,Bettanagere Shankar,to kill the other,Bettanagere Srinivas. In March,after Srinivas was shifted to Mysore jail,prisoner Balaji Rao fired five bullets from a 0.38 semi-automatic pistol at him. Srinivas survived. On April 15 and April 17,a Bangalore criminal known only as Akram went on a shooting spree with a 9 mm country-made semi-automatic pistol against former business partners. He injured two persons including a local politician. A police encounter killed Akram on May 4. On May 28,the Bangalore police announced the seizure of two unlicensed,country-made 7.65 calibre semi-automatic pistols after the arrest of Mardhan Suleman Khadri,younger brother of Bachkana,and local criminal-turned-politician Ismail Sharif alias Nana. The guns were allegedly supplied to the politician on Bachkanas orders. For years,the weapon of choice for the local underworld in Karnataka used to be machetes and choppers. Only in the rare crimes when the Mumbai underworld has been involved would sophisticated hand-held weapons be used. That is now changing. Guns are now become an integral part of crime in Karnataka. Signs of the changes are most visible in the number of pistols semi-automatic,hand-held small arms or pistols of the 9 mm,7.65 mm,8 mm and 0.38 calibres seized by the police in the last five years. What is of concern to police is not just the numbers but also the fact that these weapons are all country-made and can still be given rifling and reloading characteristics that were for long considered not achievable outside a factory manufacturing setup. It is a serious situation, says H N Sathyanarayana Rao,additional director general of police for crime and technical services. Efforts are being made to sensitise police officers. they need to go beyond their cases and track the origin of these weapons. Some idea of the origin of the 9 mm and 7.65 pistols used in crimes in the state over the last few months has come from the arrest of three persons linked to the late Akram. When Akram was in the Bangalore central prison in 2009,he met a man called Barkhatullah from Bihar. Barkhatullah told several prisoners including Akram that he could get them semi-automatic pistols. After they were released,Akram contacted Barkhatullah and got his 9 mm pistol, says Bangalores joint commissioner of police (crime) Alok Kumar. Though Bachkana was in the same prison in 2009,police are not certain if they struck up an alliance for the supply of pistols. Barkhatullah gave his contact numbers to several prisoners, says an officer. According to the superintendent of police in Gulbarga,Pravin Madhukar,investigations into the attempt to kill Srinivas in the Gulbarga jail have revealed that the 9 mm country-made pistol was supplied by a man called Saifan lodged in the Dharwad prison. We have just got custody of Saifan. In these districts like Gulbarga that border Maharashtra,guns are common. You can get one for as little as Rs 5,000, the Gulbarga SP said. Bachkanas brother Mardhan has meanwhile claimed that he got two 7.65 mm guns by paying Rs 1.2 lakh to a contact,Basava,whose details were provided from prison by Bachkana himself. Much of the suspicion of a common point of origin for the country-made weapons surfacing is based on characteristics like rifling,their resemblance to German Browning pistols,and the spellings used for the markings. Some weapons say Made in Itly. Guns also carry made in markings for the US,the UK,China and England but use spellings like pistl or for miltry use only or only army suply. Police and forensic experts suspect the weapons are being made underground in India with a factory-like setup and the expertise of people who have worked on arms in factories. In the old days it was believed that semi-automatic pistols with recoil action reloading can never be country-made. That seems to changing. At this rate even an AK-47 can be country-made, says a senior police source. According to officials,part of the problem is the availability of ammunition. Prohibited 9 mm bullets and 7.65 mm bullets from arms factories at Khirki and Kamariya have been seized along with guns in Karnataka. Another area of concern is the lack of coordinated nationwide databases of gun seizures. We are all living in our own frog wells. Little information is shared among states, says an official.
