More surprises at ammo spot

Divers pop up with bag full of bullets in a pond at Jogarpara village in Bogra yesterday. Police and paramilitary BDR recovered 93,192 bullets and 180kg explosives from the village over the last few days. Photo: STAR

Police and the paramilitary BDR seized 11,050 more bullets and 12 kg explosives from different ditches in Kahalu and apparently established the gunrunners' route yesterday.

With the busts, the munition count rose to 93,192 bullets and 180 kg of explosives. Police sources said they are working on one of the possibilities that the ammunition was being smuggled to guerrillas in Nepal from a Tripura-based separatist outfit.

Most of yesterday's haul was found in the pond of Shahjahan, an Awami League (AL) adherent, at Jogarpara. The relatives of one Abdul Zabbar dumped the cache there at dawn.

Zabbar's wife Rawshan Ara was arrested on Tuesday after police found a large chunk of the cache in the septic tank of her house.

Some 750 bullets were retrieved from a roadside ditch at Baromail on Tuesday midnight.

Earlier, police asked villagers, who snatched bags of bullets and explosives from a truck, to drop their loots into nearby ditches.

"There must be several thousand bullets and packets of explosives strewn at ditch bottoms and we will continue the search for a few more days," said Wahedul Islam, officer-in-charge of the Kahalu Police Station.

One of the assumptions is that the ammunition and explosives were smuggled into Bangladesh through a place on the Sylhet-Chittagong border from a Tripura-based separatist outfit and were heading for Nepal.

They said the arms syndicate at Kahalu was to take delivery of the ammunition and smuggle it out to India through the Dhamuirhat border in Naogaon, a police source said.

The Dhamuirhat border is about 80 kilometres from Jogarpara village in Dupchachia.

A highly placed source said the smugglers chose Kahalu and Dhamuirhat border routes following plugging of the Dinajpur-Panchagarh borders in the wake of militant activities in the region.

After reaching Kahalu, the truck carrying the ammunition beneath piles of ripe pineapples rolled up and down between Kahalu and Dupchachia hesitatingly without finding those who were supposed to take delivery of the cargo.

Police said Jalal, the prime accused in the case and brother of Jamaat-e-Ismali worker Delwar Hossain, rented the house of AL leader Sayed Akhlakur Rahman Pintu at Tk 20,000 a month to store the munitions.

Jalal was arrested at the Airport Railway Station in Dhaka on Monday.

Police and intelligence sources said they were looking for another freight of munitions which was supposed to take the same path.

Police were also looking for several other bigwigs including three from Bogra. Of the Bogra suspects, one is a municipal ward commissioner and leader of motor workers, another is a contractor who once lived in Atrai upazila of Naogaon and the rest is a friend of Jalal.

"We are yet to crosscheck the facts," police said.