Police suspect more weapons hidden by disbanded group
TURA: East Garo Hills Police has made a major discovery about weapons secretly being sold by some ANVC cadres to the banned GNLA for a huge sum of money which has been seized in an operation across the Simsang river near Chisobibra on Monday.
Three persons who were tasked with selling the weapons to the GNLA and collect the money for the ANVC cadres have been arrested and the transaction money amounting to seventeen lakh rupees has been recovered.
The lid over the secretive ‘cash for guns’ deal by some members of the now disbanded ANVC and the GNLA was blown wide open after East Garo Hills Police stumbled upon crucial leads during an operation launched on Monday morning in Gitokgre village area, across Sisobibra village not far from Williamnagar.
“We received inputs about presence of GNLA militants in the village who may have been planning to target security forces in an ambush. So we immediately launched an operation and then came across crucial facts about an arms transaction that took place in the morning itself,” revealed district police chief Davis Nestell R Marak.
“Money to the tune of seventeen lakh rupees paid by the GNLA for four sophisticated weapons of the ANVC have been recovered by our teams,” informed the district SP.
Narrating the sequence of events the police informed that villagers Horison T. Sangma and Doron N Marak along with his son Tengsrang were given three Self-Loading Rifles (SLRs) and a carbine machine gun by some ANVC cadres to sell to the GNLA.
A ten-member armed GNLA team led by one militant commander identified as Lohon descended on the village on Sunday evening to wait for the weapons. The guns were handed over to them by the three villagers on Monday morning and in return Lohon paid them seventeen lakh rupees before moving out of the area with the weapons.
The arms deal took place on a day when both the ANVC and ANVC-B were being officially disbanded before the government in Tura’s Dikki-Bandi stadium.
Following the conclusion of the arms deal, the money wrapped in a plastic bag was taken to a nearby jungle by Horison Sangma and buried in a crab hole to await the arrival of the ANVC cadres sometime later.
After the arrest and subsequent interrogation of all three villagers, a police search party led by Horison went to the jungle and recovered the entire amount.
Further search of the same area led to the discovery of another buried consignment of electronic explosive detonators, binoculars, wireless handsets and SLR chargers and magazine pouches.
Police have now come to know that in 2005 three ANVC militants had come to Gitokgre village and befriended Horison and Doron.
They made the two villagers bear witness to the stacking away of a large assortment of weapons in a hideout not far from the village and asked them to keep guard over the hideout until they returned at a later date. It was only in October, this year, that the militants returned to the site where the arms were stored.
ANVC hid huge cache of arms in 2005: Police
The ANVC which signed a ceasefire agreement with the government in July 2004 reportedly stacked away a large number of sophisticated weapons which till date have not been found by security forces, revealed police.
The four arms – three SLR and one carbine machine gun – sold to the GNLA on Monday morning were part of the hidden cache of weapons of the ANVC stored away by some of the cadres.
“We have come to know that eleven sophisticated weapons from the same hidden place was removed by the ANVC in October this year and some of it was displayed during the disbanding ceremony in Tura on Monday,” revealed East Garo Hills police chief Davis Nestell R Marak.
Police are not ruling out the possibility of more hideouts containing weapons in other parts of Garo Hills.
“At the height of its militancy the ANVC had a stockpile of rocket launchers and light machine guns but these were not surrendered during the disbanding ceremony. So where are these weapons?” questioned Meghalaya Police even as it launches an investigation into the arms deal.