Looking for bomb, RPF cops find gun

The Railway Protection Force (RPF) personnel at the Nashik Road station were screening passengers’ baggage on Friday morning, looking for concealed bombs and explosives.

Things went off peacefully until around 10.45am, constable Renuka Tiwari and head constable RS Tripathi, who were manning the X-ray machine, saw some suspicious looking articles concealed in an air bag that had just passed through the screening machine.

The owner of the bag, Dharamveer Singh, was asked to open it. As he refused to comply, the cops took him and his friend, Kanjilal Patel, 26, to the RPF office.

There Singh was forced to open his bag. Inside cops found a country-made revolver, three live cartridges, five cell phones, 10 SIM cards registered in the names of 10 people, Rs11,000 in cash and two gold rings.

“Singh, 30, hails from Kanpur. Patel had come with him to the station to see him off. Both were arrested on Friday,” RPF inspector Atul Kshirsagar said. A Nashik court has remanded the two in police custody till April 19, he added.

Preliminary investigations have revealed that Singh was going to his native place. He had gone to the station to board the Pushpak Express.

Both he and Patel had been working as waiters in Nashik for two years.

Kshirsagar said that Singh could be a member of a gang, which procures arms and ammunition from Uttar Pradesh and sell them to robber gangs in Nashik and other parts of Maharashtra.