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Police said Birbal Shaw (27), a sugarcane juice vendor near Barrackpore Cantonment who also worked as a pump operator at the AFS in Barrackpore, had attracted the attention of suspicious social media accounts by portraying himself online as an Air Force employee. Birbal and his associate Avi Dey alias Obi (32), a plumber who allegedly has links to the illegal firearms trade, had sold a country-made pistol to the main accused, U Mallesh, an ex-havildar, in 2022 when he was posted in Barrackpore, according to the police. Avi Dey, who has an Arms Act case registered against him at Khardah police station in West Bengal in 2012, was contacted by Mallesh with a proposal to supply stolen firearms. Among the 37 accounts Mallesh follows, one account is of a person claiming to be arms and ammunition dealer from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan who puts up videos with factory-made arms including assault rifles and pistols. Police said Mallesh’s Instagram account had no posts and only 28 followers.
Avi Dey claimed that he is not into dealing with firearms and we have to verify if he had contacted any potential buyer,” police said. “The user said that he only sells air guns and not factory-made firearms. But before he could make any meaningful contact with such people, we arrested him,” said an investigator. “We are analysing the evidence gathered so far including the social media activities of the accused and soon take a call on how many of the seven recently arrested accused have to be taken into police custody for further probe,” said a police officer.
Hyderabad : The investigation into the theft and attempted sale of firearms from the Madras Regiment in Bollarum has taken a new turn, with police suspecting that one of the accused was approached online by Pakistan-based honey-trap operatives after falsely projecting himself as an Air Force Station (AFS) employee on social media. “Now they both changed their affiliations and started working for another party.