Yet another arms seizure

Let's not forget that in the last one and a half months alone, quite a few arms seizures have taken place, and significantly, in the same upazila which is close to the Myanmar border. If anything, the trend is bound to spawn speculations and theories of all kinds fuelled by the lack of successful investigations leading to identification of sources, the buyers or recipients of the weapons, the smuggler-dons, the destinations these were consigned to, and the specific purposes behind the underworld operations. It is absolutely necessary that rackets and networks clearly working to sabotage national security and peace, apart from the small time operators, are apprehended and fully neutralised. There is a strong suspicion that Bangladesh is proving vulnerable as a conduit for arms smuggling. This is not to suggest though, that the weapons are all for external use, quite some might well be for internal use for militant or destabilisation purposes.

It was quite sometime back that the Chittagong arms haul, the biggest to-date in the country, took place; one would have thought that the security forces hugely alerted by it had made the territory safe, by now, from arms smuggling or proliferation of caches in the hideouts of criminals and gun-runners with ulterior motives.

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Pending probes have a way of encumbering any newly-launched investigation. That's why, we have to clear the backlog investigations based on a few known hypotheses so as to be able to achieve the best result with any new investigative challenge. It is understood that US arms experts had visited Naikkhonchhari, but were apparently intrigued by the erasing of the brand names and the names of the manufacturing countries from the seized weapons. To our mind, there is an obvious networking behind the clandestine operations, which may be regional or international in nature so that it's highly imperative that regional and international cooperation is actively solicited by us to stem the trafficking of fire arms.