Two crew members of Danish merchant vessel Danica Sunrise that was intercepted and searched by the Indian Coast Guard yesterday, have confessed that they dumped two AK-47 assault rifles and three ship drowning firearms in the Arabian Sea.
Sources in the Coast Guard said the two foreign nationals, who had confessed of illegally carrying firearms, were British nationals Christopher Kohnson and Steven Michael.
“The crew members have said in their statement that they were carrying arms to act against Somali pirates and they were not trying to smuggle arms into India,” said a senior official.
“The crew members have told us that they bought these weapons from an open market in Egypt, but threw them into the sea before entering the Indian waters. We can’t rely on the statements of these crew members because it is possible that they could have thrown these weapons in Indian waters after they realised that they were trapped by the Indian Navy and Coast Guard,” said the official.
The ship was intercepted by a team of the Indian Navy and Indian Coast Guard officials on the basis of specific intelligence inputs from the Intelligence Bureau that the vessel was carrying arms and ammunitions. Soon after the ship was intercepted, search operations were launched to locate the arms. Though the investigators, along with the officials of Anti-Terrorism squad of the Mumbai Police, searched the entire vessel, they could not find anything.
During a joint questioning of the eight crew members by the intelligence agencies, Mumbai Police and Indian Coast Guard, the two crew members confessed they were carrying two AK-47 assault rifles and three ship drowning firearms.
