Man held with hand grenade sent to police custody

Malkeet Singh, who was arrested by the Amritsar police with a hand grenade and a pistol here on Thursday, had been in contact with UK-based gangster Dharma Sandhu for the past nearly nine months.

Sandhu was a close associate of Pakistan-based and ISI-backed Babbar Khalsa International terrorist Harwinder Singh Rinda.

Preliminary investigations have revealed that at the behest of Dharma Sandhu, Malkeet, a resident of Pandori village, was hiring unemployed and vulnerable youths in border villages for retrieving drugs and weapons consignments. Certain names have cropped up during the interrogation of Malkeet and police teams have launched a hunt to arrest them. They were allegedly in contact with Rinda and Sandhu.

The police fear that they had retrieved a number of consignments of sophisticated weapons and explosive materials smuggled from the neighbouring nation via drones on the instructions of Dharma Sandhu and Rinda.

Rinda and other state and non-state actors are active in Pakistan for pushing in drugs, weapons and explosives in order to disturb the peaceful atmosphere in Punjab by carrying out targeted killings and explosions.

Earlier this year, a number of instances of hand grenade attacks at various police stations and abandoned police chowkis were reported in different parts of Punjab, especially in the border belt of Amritsar, Gurdaspur and Batala. The police had successfully cracked these cases by arresting the suspects involved in hurling hand grenades at police establishments. Meanwhile, Malkeet Singh was produced in an Ajnala court, which sent him to police remand for five days.