In 2020, two weapons were seized from Atiq Ahmed’s old office

PRAYAGRAJ: Mafia don Atiq Ahmed and his gang were using his old office situated in the partially demolished structure at city’s Chakia locality to stash illegal cash and weapons. The structure from where a rich haul of cash and weapons was made on Tuesday, had earlier also yielded two sophisticated and expensive firearms in 2020.
In 2020, a team of Khuldabad police had seized two advanced and sophisticated weapons, including one rifle worth Rs 35 lakh and one 30 pistol worth Rs 15 lakh from the same partially demolished structure. Likewise, on Tuesday the place yielded a huge cache of illegal money and weapons, including Rs 72. 37 lakh cash and 10 sophisticated firearms.
The firearms included one Colt pistol of .45 bore, four pistols of 0.32 bore, three country-made pistols of 0.315 bore and two country-made pistols of 0.312 bore along with 112 live cartridges of different bores, one colt magazine with 10 bullet capacity were recovered from Atiq’s old office building in Chakia.
Highly placed police and STF sources told TOI on Wednesday that a team of Khuldabad police had seized the two costly weapons from Atiq’s old office building in 2020 during a search operation.
“When the district authorities cancelled the arm licences of gangster Atiq in 2017, he did not surrender the weapons to the police and instead hid them inside the partially damaged structure. These firearms were seized by the Khuldabad police in 2020,” they added.
Tuesday’s recovery of a cache of weapons has alerted the intelligence agencies and police, who have launched a fresh hunt to break the supply chain of arms and ammunition to the gang.