Weapons of mass confusion

People in Purulia remember the night it rained arms and ammunition

- PREMA RAJARAM/PURULIA

It has been 30 years since weapons fell from the sky in West Bengal's Purulia district, yet some answers still hang in the air. "This matter cannot remain hidden; they came in a plane. The questions you're asking me should be asked of the government," says Acarya Anirvanananda Avadhuta, rector master of the Ananda Marga Pracaraka Samgha, a spiritual organisation police claim was the intended recipient of the weapons. "How did this plane from outside India land here? There was security. Did Ananda Marga have the power to do all this? We are [easy] to blame; give us a bad name and finish us."

On December 17, 1995, an Antonov aircraft carrying Danish mastermind Kim Davy, British national Peter Bleach and a five-member Latvian crew flew low and dropped 500 rifles, including AK-47s, 2.5 lakh rounds of ammunition, a dozen rocket launchers, antitank grenades and night-vision equipment—altogether worth half a million dollars at the time—between two hillocks in Purulia.

Job done, they flew to Thailand, where they reportedly had a great time. On the way back, they stopped to refuel in Madras. When they took off again, the Indian Air Force intercepted them and forced them to land in Mumbai, where they were apprehended. All except Davy were arrested, jailed and released over the next decade.

Davy had given officials the slip in Mumbai. “He knew he was going to be arrested, so on the pretext of paying the landing charges, he escaped to Pune, then Nepal and then beyond,” says then superintendent of police in the CBI Loknath Behera, who investigated the case. “The Latvians and Bleach got stuck, got arrested, and the plane was seized.”

Bleach was lodged in Kolkata’s Presidency jail for eight years; he was pardoned in 2004, after the British government under prime minister Tony Blair intervened.