Dehradun, Dec. 7 -- A man accused of running an inter-state arms smuggling operation was arrested late on Friday night in Udham Singh while he was en route to Rudrapur to allegedly deliver a consignment, a senior police officer in the know said on Saturday. The accused, identified as Mohammad Asim (32), was arrested by a joint team of the special task force's Kumaon unit and Rudrapur police, senior superintendent of police (STF) Navneet Singh Bhullar. The police recovered four illegal automatic pistols, one shotgun, and 40 cartridges from the accused's possession. He was earlier arrested in 2017 in connection with the probe into the jailbreak at Patiala's Nabha jail and served six years in jail. He was acquitted by a Patiala court in March 2023 and subsequently released after the trial concluded. "For some time, our teams had been receiving inputs that illegal arms and cartridges were being smuggled on a large scale from Bajpur in Udham Singh Nagar district to various parts of the state and outside. The team worked on these inputs discreetly, and after nearly a month of surveillance, our Kumaon unit received a tip-off late last night that an arms smuggler from Bajpur was set to deliver a large cache of weapons in Rudrapur. Acting on this, the team, along with Rudrapur police station, arrested the accused under the Kashipur Road flyover with a substantial quantity of pistols, guns, and cartridges. He had brought the consignment from Bajpur for sale in Rudrapur," Bhullar said. His gunhouse in Bajpur of Udham Singh Nagar was raided by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in 2023, the police said. htc...