The ship and its crew members were apprehended and questioned by teams from several central intelligence, defence and security agencies.
The crew of the Danish ship MV Danica Sunrise, which was detained by the Indian security agencies on Sunday, has reportedly confessed that they were carrying dangerous and sophisticated firearms like AK-47 assault rifles and ship sinking pistols on-board. But the crew members threw the cache of firearms in the sea, after the Indian agencies started chasing them.
The ship and its crew members were apprehended and questioned by teams from several central intelligence, defence and security agencies. Post receiving an intelligence input that a ship carrying arms and ammunitions was moving towards the Mumbai coast and that it would offload at some landing point, a search was launched and Coast Guard (CG) officials diverted the CG ship Subhadra Kumari Chauhan to look for the suspected ship.
With no idea about the name of the ship and names of just the two suspects the search was carried out on all the vessels off the Mumbai coast. The suspects were two crew members of the eight on the Danica Sunrise. They were retired Royal Army soldiers and worked on the ship as security guards. They have been identified as Christopher Johnson and Steven Michael. The duo was supposed to leave the ship on Tuesday and fly back to home to England but were not allowed to do so as the investigations were still on.
“The crew members have confessed that they had two AK-47 rifles and two ship drowning pistols when they started sailing from Egypt, they had bought the fire arms from the open market there and they had receipts for the same. They sailed from Egypt to Kuwait and then sailed towards India where they said they had decided to wait for a few days and get in touch with local agents to see if they could get them any cargo” said a senior coast guard officer.
He added, “An armed party of CG personnel are keeping an eye on the crew members and will not allow the vessel to sail till the investigations are complete. Earlier they had denied that they were carrying any firearms but later confessed. This led to suspicion and teams from various agencies like ATS, IB and defence are questioning them to know the same”.
Other than teams from the intelligence agencies, police and maritime security, a team of the elite commando force, the National Security Guards (NSG) with sniffer dogs has boarded the vessel to carry out checks on the kind of firearms, ammunitions or explosives that were stored on the ship. It is suspected that some firearms or explosives could still be on the vessel.
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