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 incident 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.

Continuing from the previous chapter, 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 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 Kim 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!””