‘Gun shop owners, staff sold arms deposited for safe keeping, excess bullets’
Times of India | 7 September 2025
Kolkata: The partner-owners and their employees at Nursing Chunder Daw & Co, Asia's oldest licensed gun shop located at BBD Bag, were involved in exploiting gaps in the gun and cartridge selling business to sell weapons and ammunition illegally, claimed the Bengal STF on Saturday.
According to STF sources, the questioning of the three brothers — Subir Daw, Abir Daw, and Subrata Daw, all from Girish Park — revealed that they exploited the practice of licensed arms holders depositing their weapons at the shop — sometimes for years — without reclaiming them. The reasons for not reclaiming them varied, from the deaths of the owner to lapses in gun licences that never got renewed.
"In many such cases, the shop owners illegally sold these arms to unauthorised persons," said an STF officer.
That is not all. The accused were also aware that each gun licence came with a cap on the number of cartridges allowed to be bought against it yearly. "Very rarely do gun licence holders buy the full stock of bullets allotted to them. The accused manipulated these bullet usage records by claiming excess usage for testing or fake sales. In truth, the bullets were sold to unauthorised dealers at a premium," claimed an STF official.
"When we kept asking them for records of the 41 guns that we seized on Thursday, they came up with records as old as 60 years ago that belonged to other weapons. Thus, it is a tactic to delay the probe. We found that they recruited new employees after the arrest of two of them in Feb. Even these employees are under lens and are being questioned. We believe there are inter-state links at play here, with one gang member limited to playing a definite role and not knowing much about overall illegal operations.
We are taking CCTV footage of several weeks from the Dalhousie shop vicinity and analysing the same," said a senior officer.
Police said there is a possibility that they might seek fresh permission to question Madhusudan Mukherjee again. A huge cache of arms was recovered from Mukherjee (66), after which links with the Daws also appeared. "We plan to question the brothers and Mukherjee face to face if allowed by the court," said police.