STF nabs man with 8 pistols, Sikligar arms smuggling racket busted in Rudrapur
Khajan Singh, 24, a resident of Rudrapur in Udham Singh Nagar district. He was arrested by the special task force (STF) of Uttarakhand police from Rudrapur bus station following a tip-off, SSP (STF) Navneet Singh Bhullar said.
"He was accompanied by three other acquaintances in a car. They dropped him at the bus station and sped away, followed by an ongoing investigation to nab them too. After nabbing Singh, police frisked his bag and recovered eight semi-automatic pistols from his possession," Bhullar said.
Singh was then taken into custody. During interrogation, he told police he had travelled to Burhanpur in Madhya Pradesh on July 20 to procure the weapons from a Sikligar village and intended to sell them in Uttarakhand during the ongoing local body elections. He returned to Rudrapur on the night between Wednesday and Thursday.
He revealed that he bought the pistols from Sartaz Singh, a notorious arms smuggler belonging to the Sikligar community in MP and admitted to sourcing weapons from him on earlier occasions too.
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Singh, who had previously been lodged in jail for loot and arms smuggling cases, said he planned to sell the pistols for Rs 60,000 to Rs 1.5 lakh each.
STF officials said Singh's statement pointed to a deeper supply chain of locally made firearms feeding into electoral violence. "A probe is on to find out about his customers and nab his associates involved in the crime," Bhullar said.
The Sikligars, who are found among both Hindu and Sikh communities, were historically gunsmiths in Guru Gobind Singh's army.
After the colonial-era ban on arms-making, many families from the community — particularly those in Burhanpur, Dhar and Khargone — are suspected to have continued the trade clandestinely. In recent years, several police operations in MP have uncovered large caches of locally fabricated pistols, Mausers and revolvers made using truck springs, bicycle frames and scrap iron in makeshift furnaces.
An investigation on the same by the MP police also revealed that they were supplying illegal arms to at least 19 states.
The weapons are often trafficked across state borders to Punjab, Delhi, UP, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand through a network of carriers and buyers. In one such case, Punjab police busted a similar module in Khargone linked to radical outfits and gangs. Officers added that Singh's case was a direct example of how these low-cost weapons — some of which take up to 10 days to manufacture — enter electoral hotspots and fuel local crime.
The demand around elections allows smugglers to push prices from Rs 1,000–2,000 for crude pistols to as high as Rs 1.5 lakh for improved semi-automatic models
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