"It's raining guns and bullets" - the conclusion

 

Continuing from the earlier two blogs: 

What Peter Bleach told me was that procuring the arms and ammunition (from Bulgaria) and the Antonov-26 aircraft (from Latvia) was easy as pie. Assembling the crew was also a walk in the park. After the break-up of Russia, the economy of the splinter countries like Latvia was in bad shape and most of the crew were desperate for a job, any job. However, the conspirators’ entire plan was crumbling because, apparently, procuring the military-grade parachutes was a big hurdle, it being a very tightly controlled item. After a long global search, finally, they managed to procure them from South Africa (SA). One Deepak Manikan alias Dayanand brought the parachutes and collapsible shock-absorbing bases (for a roller effect so that the ordnance would not break upon landing) from an SA army surplus dealer. Deepak was in the plane at the time of the airdrop and peeled off from the party at Phuket.

 

There is some dispute about the amount of arms, ammunition and explosives. In that first examination of Peter Bleach, he said that the original deal (reduced later) was for 2,500 Kalashnikov (AK-47) rifles, 25 pistols, 15 lac rounds of ammo, 100 rocket-propelled anti-tank grenades, 25 PM-79 anti-personnel landmines, 10 RPG-7 rocket launchers, Dragunov sniper  rifles with optical sights and Night Vision Devices, a total 5-10 tonnes of lethal cargo. He has given different versions at different points of time. What was recovered was 260 firearms, 24,428 rounds of ammo, 10 rocket launchers and so on. Apparently, at the relevant time, a car was supposed to shine its headlights on a three-storied white building (Taherbera village, Bansgarh, a training centre of Ananda Marg) where the weapons were to be dropped. For some reason, that didn’t happen so they had to drop the parachutes solely by the grid reference. One parachute had definitely dropped at the right point and one was probably slightly off. The material in the first consignment had probably disappeared because it dropped in the area completely controlled by the Ananda Margis. The second one (probably two) dropped wrong and it was this second consignment/s which was discovered and led to the sensational aftermath. Since the operation was not as smooth as they expected, they hurried off. They dropped a remaining parachute of arms and explosives over Bay of Bengal on their way from Calcutta to Phuket. 

This brought me to the role of Peter Bleach. Before I could ask him anything, he asked me why they had not been arrested in Varanasi when he had given all information to British authorities and through them to the Indian agencies. He claimed he was acting as a double agent so that the criminals could be caught. He readily admitted to arranging the supplies, the aircraft and practically everything on a strictly commercial basis but wanted the rogues to be caught. However, I kept asking him why then he himself was in the aircraft and he never could give a satisfactory answer to that one question. Bleach was deeply involved in the conspiracy and the criminality. It was he who had organised the fraudulent End User Certificate from Major General Md Subed Ali Bhuiyan, Principal Staff Officer, PMO, Armed Forces Division, Dhaka Cantonment against which the Bulgarian firms supplied the weapons.

Bleach confessed that some firearms were still inside the aircraft. The aircraft had been sealed. There was a lot of debate as to who had the authority to break open the seal. The rules were checked and it turned out that only the Customs officials had that authority at that point. After the aircraft was opened, we went in and Bleach smartly opened up the floorboards, picked out different parts of the firearms in different locations and deftly assembled a rifle. The aircraft contained two Dragunov sniper rifles, three Makarov pistols, ammo, telescopic instrument, Night Vision Devices, lap-top computer of Kim Davy, cameras, exposed films and a briefcase of Kim Davy,

This threw up the role of Varanasi Customs. On its way to Purulia, the aircraft was stationed at Varanasi, ex-Karachi for three hours but the Customs authorities at Varanasi did not bother to inspect or rummage it, as was their duty. Once the aircraft left Varanasi, it became a domestic flight and Calcutta security or Customs would not check it unless there was some specific information.

 

Lots have been written on the subject and lots have been speculated. Based on that first interrogation and other material, here is my take:

 

The whole organization of Ananda Marg was not involved. It was probably a strictly commercial operation by a small group in the Ananda Marg to sell the weapons to some extremist groups. ULFA and LTTE were mentioned but could be others. Members of this Ananda Marg group must have ranked pretty high in the organisation. They tried to take advantage of the fact that there is a very large swathe of land in Purulia which was completely controlled by Ananda Marg and was a no-go area for the local Police. One consignment probably fell in there and disappeared for ever. 

The Latvian crew members were fairly innocent of the conspiracy till a late stage. They knew that they were flying an unauthorised aircraft. They had witnessed the firearms being loaded and the pilot had to open the rear door of the aircraft for the armsdrop and so on, but I guess, they were desperate for a buck. 

Peter Bleach’s protestations were without merit. He calculated that there was an infinitesimally small chance of their being caught. He was just taking out a tiny insurance through involving British security establishment, on the off-chance of anything going awry. The insurance was not too robust or watertight because he estimated the risk as small. After being caught, he desperately wanted to be an “approver,” i.e., a government witness against the others. Bleach was working hand in glove with Kim Davy as is clear from the fact that his evidence against the Indian prison system proved critical for Kim Davy not being deported to India from Denmark. However, Kim Davy was key, along with one Satyendra Narayan Singh @ Satyanarayan Gowda @ Randy. At the time of the armsdrop, the latter was in Purulia to “receive” the ordnance. Kim Davy’s sheer audacity in flying back through India after such a hullabaloo takes my breath away.

I returned to Calcutta a day or two after the arrested party had reached and resumed my humdrum duties as SP, Calcutta Airport. A whole week later, I (along with other SPs) received an advisory that a European had bought a plane and was in the process of transporting a large consignment of arms and ammunition to a particular place in Purulia … (the complete message has been reproduced in Chandan Nandy’s book). The input was specific, pinpointed and actionable; only about 10 days too late. Apparently, someone junior in charge of dissemination of the input mistook the location in Purulia as part of Bihar hence the original communication had gone only to that state.

 

Whatever happened next? Well, Ananda Marg is still operating although their headquarters, Ananda Nagar is no longer a no-go area for the Police. The court sentenced Peter Bleach and the five Latvian crew members to life imprisonment in 2000. Under pressure from foreign governments, the government of India released first, the Latvian crew and subsequently, Peter Bleach who is in UK and has been going around blithely testifying against Indian prisons, Indian systems, Indian everything. Kim Davy is enjoying life in Denmark. He has written a book, “De Kalder Mig Terrorist” (“They Call Me Terrorist”) and periodically appears on obliging Indian TV channels raving and ranting about CPM, Jyoti Basu and such others and spinning ever more fanciful conspiracy theories involving Narasimha Rao, Pappu Yadav, Indian Air Force and so on. The other chief conspirator, Satyendra Narayan Singh @ Randy has never been traced. Meanwhile, a very large quantity of arms, ammunitions and explosives are lying around somewhere “out there,” undetected. And waiting …

"It's raining guns and bullets" - the continuance

 

Any Police investigation, anywhere in the world, tends to have certain flaws because perfect information is never available. In hindsight, everyone has 20-20 vision and it is easy to say such and such a thing could have been done. Also, luck plays no small part in an investigation and is often the difference between resounding success and abject failure. The Purulia arms drop case was a major investigation. Further, since it spanned continents and a long time-frame involving shadowy dramatis personae of various nationalities, it not only involved serious flaws on the part of various institutions and authorities in many countries, it also entailed some at-that-time-sensitive information I happened to be privy to. My natural inclination has always been towards faceless anonymity. However, court judgement has been pronounced in the case and is available in the public domain. There have been movies and documentaries on the incident. A Parliamentary Committee went into the episode at length and its findings and observations are also public. One journalist, Chandan Nandy has painstakingly collated a lot of documentation and published a book on it. So, a few things can now be told. 

All the ‘facts’ I am putting down are available in the public domain. As to the rest, my impressions are based essentially on a first interrogation, some conversations with colleagues and counterparts in other agencies and bits and pieces which stuck in memory subsequently, hence complete authenticity is not vouched for – that is for the people who pursued the investigation for a longer period.

 

Continuing from the previous blog post, when the DIG, CID, Dy SP, CID and I (that ace team, remember?) landed up in Bombay, it was quite late into the night. We got to the room inside the airport where the accused persons were being interrogated. It was almost impossible to get into that room. The Who’s Who of the Indian security establishment from many different agencies were already there. Rank-wise, all three of us were way junior and rated much lower on the pecking order. However, we were the Police and had primary jurisdiction so, in my naivete, I was straining at the leash to barge in. It was all the DIG could do to (wisely) restrain me. After a fair amount of wait, the senior guys were satisfied with their interrogation. We got a debrief and custody of the accused persons. Six persons were apprehended, Peter Bleach of UK and five Latvian crew. The Latvian crew could not speak English and we couldn’t find a person speaking their language at such short notice. I examined Peter Bleach over two days. Here is what I gathered:

 

While I had been correct in my surmise that the aircraft with call sign YL-LDB was in fact involved in the arms drop on the night of December 17/18, I was wrong in deducing that it had done so when it pretended to proceed to Yangon and then came back to Calcutta. Even though it had actually reached Calcutta the first time even a little before the filed flight plan time, it had dropped the lethal cargo on way from Varanasi to Calcutta by taking a detour. What explained the lack of time gap was that it had been helped by tail wind so the actual flight time from Varanasi to Calcutta was less than what was anticipated and filed for in the flight plan. The fact that the Yangon bit matched the exact time required to fly from Calcutta to Purulia and back was a happy coincidence – call it investigative luck!

 

In a case of ‘great minds think alike’ or ‘fools seldom differ’ (take your pick!), a central agency had followed the same route of deduction and had also somewhat zeroed in on this aircraft but, as so often happens, the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. Also, unlike the DIG, state CID, whose investigative instincts immediately latched on to YL-LDB as the rogue aircraft like a homing pigeon, the central agency guys were tiptoeing around the pointers and their needle of suspicion had not solidified into certainty. The central agency and the state government were acting independently of each other. While this was going on, the criminals were fully aware of the sensation the incident had created but they either seem to have been so audacious or had such immense faith in the Indian “regulatory incoherence” that they risked another trip (from Phuket to Karachi) via Indian territory – they could easily have refuelled elsewhere; Sri Lanka, for instance. They had actually planned to refuel at Calcutta and had filed the flight plan accordingly. Why they changed their plan to refuelling at Madras is a question I still don’t have an answer to.

 

Despite the specific all-airport alert which included the call sign, the aircraft managed to refuel at Madras and take off for Karachi without any hindrance on December 21, 1995. Only after it had taken off, authorities realised the misstep. Two fighter aircrafts were scrambled post-haste and the rogue aircraft was ordered to land at Bombay airport. Even so, it was touch and go. A little longer, and the rogue aircraft would have crossed Indian airspace and flown off into the mists of anonymity, a mystery wrapped in an enigma, the whole thing inside a puzzle. The aircraft landed at Bombay at around 1.30 AM, early morning of December 22. However, these two fighter jets, after force-landing the rogue aircraft, just flew away. They didn’t inform the airport security, immigration, Customs or airport authority at Bombay as to who, what, when, where or why. Even the court judgement had a lot of scathing things to say about the fallout of this.

 

The rogue aircraft contained Peter Bleach, the main dealer of the arms, ammunition, explosives and the aircraft, Kim Davy, one of the masterminds with Ananda Marg links and five Latvian crew. Peter Bleach and Kim Davy wondered why they were made to land and were waiting on the tarmac for a while. Finally, an oil company manager and an airport manager approached them to ask (to ask ?!) why they had landed and whether they needed any fuel. This confounded Bleach and Davy but they quickly calculated that although the aircraft had refuelled at Madras, the landing and the prospective take-off would consume more fuel than at cruise speed so they asked for a top-up. After that, they kept waiting. Kim got antsy and suspected that something was up. On the pretext of sorting out the flight plan at the air traffic control, he (probably hitched a ride with one of the managers to the terminal and) simply walked out. It was almost an hour (45 minutes as per the report then) before the Bombay airport Police was informed and they surrounded the plane and detained Peter Bleach and the five Latvians. 

If only the flight had taken the original return path through Calcutta, Kim Davy could not have escaped because I was primed, positioned and waiting with my team at Calcutta airport, per the date and time in their original flight plan –  “… of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: “It might have been!””

[To be concluded]

"It's raining guns and bullets"

On the cold, foggy morning of December 18, 1995, people of several villages in Purulia district, West Bengal woke up to an unseasonal, overnight downpour of a huge amount of firearms, ammunitions and explosives. Purulia is a sleepy district. Generally, nothing much happens there but once in a way, the district throws up something truly sensational. A few years earlier, the district had seen three Khalistani terrorists accidentally “discovered” by a routine police patrol. The terrorists kept the whole state Police force on its toes for days with the help of an AK-47. But this arms-drop incident was truly out of the world. Senior officers of CID were deployed and were camping at the spot. So were officers of State Intelligence Branch. Every day, there were new theories, prominent among them was that it was the handiwork of a hitherto unknown terrorist outfit called Laldangis. Since the area was close to Bihar, there were other theories, depending on flights of imagination by any particular officer or a particular journalist on the day. 

At that time, I was SP, Calcutta airport. Like everyone else, I was also reading reports on the incident day after day and was much intrigued. This was happening 300 kilometres away and I didn’t think it had anything to do with me.

 

A day or two after the incident, I received a call from DIG, CID who said all the clues they were chasing had run up against a dead end and could I probably try some sleuthing at the airport, just on the off chance. This was not my remit nor did I think there was any fruitful way I could contribute. Further, there was a Prime Ministerial movement so I got busy with that and the request clean slipped my mind. After the VVIP movement was over, the DIG again called and reminded. Seeing as how he was serious, I thought I’d give it a try. I went to the Air Traffic Control at Calcutta airport and asked to check all the non-scheduled flights for December 17 and night of December 17/18. To my horror, there were 84 such flights, including the overflight movements where the aircrafts didn’t land at the airport. I went through the log for each and every such aircraft movement and zeroed in on a few which pertained to the 9 PM – 5 AM window.

 

Luckily, the Watch Supervisory Officers (WSOs) who were on duty around the time could be contacted. One of them told me about a flight coming to land at the airport shortly before midnight. It was cleared to land but the pilot said he didn’t want to because the visibility was poor, at only 500 metres. Then the pilot flew away saying he would land at Yangon, Myanmar. A little later, the flight came back again, reported that he was denied permission to land at Yangon and decided to land at Calcutta despite the visibility having further reduced to 250 metres. After refuelling, the flight had gone on to Phuket, Thailand. We sat down with a scale and with the approximate speed of the aircraft as determined from the flight plan from Varanasi to Calcutta, calculated the aerial distance from Calcutta to Purulia and likely time for the aircraft to fly there and back. The times exactly matched the time the aircraft would take to pretend to be Yangon-bound from Calcutta and reappearing. [Later investigation revealed that although the conclusion was correct, the deductive process had an inadvertent flaw. About this, later.]

 

I came back to my office and reported the result of my efforts to DIG, CID who was immediately convinced that this was the rogue aircraft. I also told him that the aircraft had gone to Phuket, Thailand and had planned a return to Karachi via Calcutta (for refuelling) on December 21 night. Computers had just about seeped into our consciousness around that time. The DIG, CID rushed in with a Dy SP, a typewriter, papers and seal of office. Together, we went to the air traffic control, formally requisitioned for and “seized” the relevant papers (logs, etc.) and recorded the statements of the WSOs. I also informed the Military Liaison Unit (MLU) at the airport to inform all concerned regarding the aircraft (call sign YL-LDB) and to detain it, if detected.

 

That day, in the evening, I told the wife that I might just have cracked the Purulia case. She was dismissive – “You! The entire Police force is at its wit’s end, you cracked it! Tell me another!” I also thought it was too easy and pat. However, next night, the return flight was due. I assembled the requisite force and waited at the airport to surround and search it as soon as it landed and detain the occupants. I had taken the clearance from our top brass. We kept waiting and waiting but the flight didn’t come. I was disappointed and thought it was not to be.

 

The next morning, as soon as I reached office, I received a call from MLU, Calcutta that the aircraft had decided to go to Karachi via Madras. Unfortunately, despite the MLU alert, there was some communication gap and the flight had managed to take off from Madras for Karachi, unmolested. However, fortunately, it was force-landed at Bombay. I informed DIG, CID accordingly. I thought, that would be the end of my involvement in the case.

 

In the evening, as I was about to head back home after office, DIG, CID called me and said that the case had now unravelled and I was to accompany him to Bombay by the next available flight for effecting the arrest of the people in the aircraft and further investigation. The next flight was just about an hour away and I didn’t even have time to go home for picking up a change of clothes. Being wiser after the consequence of the last show of bravado, this time, I merely informed the wife that I had to rush to Bombay on important work.

 

DIG, CID landed up at the airport with a Dy SP who would be the first Investigating Officer of the case until CBI took over. He had scraped together whatever contingency funds were available in his office. I begged and borrowed some money from some of my staff. Even so, there wasn’t enough money for three flight tickets to Bombay – these were high-airfare days and air travel was a super-luxury. Suddenly, the DIG remembered that he had probably not yet given out his entire salary at home and there might be something left over. He rummaged in his briefcase and found enough money to make up for the shortfall. Thus, we managed the tickets to Bombay and went to arrest the prime accused Peter Bleach and the Latvian crew.

 

The next morning, the newspapers had blazing headlines as to how the sensational case had been solved and an ace (?!) team of three from West Bengal had rushed to Bombay for the arrests. The reports gave the names of the “ace” team members. After reading it all, the wife thought, maybe, just maybe, I might amount to something. At a future, indeterminate date.

(The aircraft YL-LDB)

[To be continued]