The Light at Deepak Singh’s House

Purulia, 17 December 1995: a village gathered for a child’s funeral, a plane came over in the dark, and by morning there were rifles in the trees

On 17 December 1995 Deepak Singh’s five-year-old daughter was taken to her funeral.

He lived in a village in the Jhalda area of Purulia, in the far west of Bengal, near the Bihar border. He was well liked, and that night between five and seven hundred people came to his house to sit with the family. It was cold. At that hour nobody in the villages around was usually outside, but outside Deepak Singh’s house there were hundreds of people and a bright light burning.

A little way off there was another light, where labourers were working late on a railway line.

It was a night of mourning. Nobody in the crowd was looking at the sky.

11.30 pm

At around half past eleven everyone heard it: an aircraft, low and loud, where no aircraft should have been.

It was an Antonov An-26, a Soviet-built transport registered in Latvia, with a Latvian crew of five. On board with them were a British arms dealer named Peter Bleach and a Dane who called himself Kim Davy. The plane had come from Karachi and refuelled at Varanasi on the way. Nobody on the ground in India had stopped it.

Between two hillocks near Jhalda it dropped its load on parachutes. Then it flew on.

The pallets came down across the fields and trees around Jhalda, Khatanga, Belamu and Maramu. According to the investigators, they held around five hundred rifles, most of them AK-47s, two and a half lakh rounds of ammunition, a dozen rocket launchers, anti-tank grenades and night-vision equipment. The whole load was worth about half a million dollars.

Morning

In Khatanga people had heard a loud noise in the night, like a bomb. The forest there was thick and there was talk of tigers, so nobody went out to look.

At dawn a woman went down to the pond to wash the vessels. She saw a parachute caught in a tree, and a box so big that for a moment she took it for an elephant. She went home and told her son, Subhash Tantu Bai.

The boxes had the word explosives written on them. Tantu Bai told his family not to touch them. He and another villager, Torit Banerjee, went to the police. Banerjee found a parachute load of AK-47s, AK-56s, pistols, hand grenades and cleaning kit for the guns.

Not everyone went to the police. Across the villages, people carried the weapons home. Banerjee remembers people carrying a rocket launcher home on their shoulders. Rifles were buried under houses and dropped down wells. Some were taken apart. Some were sold.

People carried a rocket launcher home on their shoulders.

The wrong place

Investigators later came to believe the drop had been meant for somewhere else. About five kilometres away stood a building belonging to Ananda Marga, a spiritual organisation that had a long and bloody quarrel with West Bengal’s Communist government, and that the CBI would later say was the intended recipient. The organisation has always denied it. Its people called the building the White House. The crew, investigators thought, had missed it.

Nobody can say for certain why. But on a winter night in the countryside, with the villages dark, the brightest things for miles around were a railway work site and the lights outside a house where hundreds of people had gathered after a child’s funeral. Deepak Singh has said himself that his lights could have been taken for a signal.

In the days after, he went out with the police and asked his neighbours to give the guns back. They took what they recovered to the Jhalda police station. He did it in the same week he lost his daughter.

The plane

The Antonov flew on to Thailand. On 21 December it came back through India, refuelled at Madras, and took off for Karachi. This time the Indian Air Force intercepted it and forced it down in Mumbai. The Latvians and Bleach were arrested. Kim Davy told officials he was going to pay the landing charges, and walked away. He went to Pune, then Nepal, and out of India.

Who the weapons were really for, who knew they were coming, and how a foreign aircraft crossed half of India and dropped an arsenal into Bengal without anyone stopping it, have been argued about ever since. None of it has been settled.

Torit Banerjee has never had any trouble remembering what time the plane came over. It was about half past eleven, and he was at Deepak Singh’s house.

If you think you have rememberd everything about this topic take this QUIZ

 

Results

QUIZ START

#1. What was the official conclusion of India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) regarding the intended recipients of the weapons dropped over Purulia?

A covert operation by the Indian central government to destabilize the state.

Naxalite insurgents operating in the West Bengal region.

The Kachin Independent Army in Myanmar, as part of a botched delivery.

The socio-spiritual organization Ananda Marga.

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#2. According to the source material, what happened to Kim Davy (Niels Holck), the alleged mastermind, immediately after the plane was forced to land in Mumbai?

He was handed over to British MI5 as part of a pre-arranged deal with Peter Bleach.

He managed to slip away from the airport and eventually returned to Denmark.

He was granted diplomatic immunity and immediately deported to Denmark.

He was arrested along with the crew and sentenced to life in prison.

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#3. The geopolitical theory surrounding the arms drop suggests the involvement of Western intelligence agencies like the CIA or MI5. What evidence from the text supports this theory?

The aircraft's flight path originated in a Western-allied country.

Peter Bleach's claim that he was an MI5 informant who had tipped off authorities.

The weapons were of American and British manufacture.

The Danish government's refusal to extradite Kim Davy.

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#4. What was particularly unusual about the flight of the Antonov An-26 aircraft before it was eventually intercepted?

It avoided Indian airspace entirely on its initial journey.

It landed to refuel in India before dropping weapons and then re-entered Indian airspace days later.

It flew at an extremely low altitude to avoid all radar detection.

It was disguised as a commercial passenger plane to avoid detection.

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#5. What was the ultimate legal outcome for Peter Bleach and the Latvian crew members involved in the arms drop?

They were acquitted of all charges by Indian courts due to lack of evidence.

They are still serving their life sentences in an Indian prison.

They were sentenced to life but were later released due to international pressure.

They were exchanged for Indian prisoners held in Latvia and the UK.

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#6. The ‘Myanmar Mistake’ theory is considered less probable for what primary reason, according to the source material?

The plane's fuel logs showed it did not have enough fuel to reach Myanmar.

The Kachin Independent Army publicly denied any connection to the weapons.

Kim Davy's own confession and maps found on the plane indicated Ananda Marga was the target.

The type of weapons dropped were not suitable for jungle warfare in Myanmar.

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#7. Which of the following items was NOT listed as part of the arsenal dropped over the Purulia district?

Rocket Launchers

Anti-Tank Grenades

AK-47 Assault Rifles

Surface-to-Air Missiles

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#8. According to a ‘Fast Fact’ in the text, what suspicious circumstance at a nearby air force base coincided with the time of the arms drop?

Communication lines between the base and air traffic control were down.

A scheduled training exercise for interceptor jets was suddenly cancelled.

The radar system was allegedly switched off or non-operational.

The on-duty personnel were all mysteriously sent on leave.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Sources & References

THE WEEK, Prema Rajaram, “Purulia Arms Drop case: 30 years later, India’s biggest mystery remains unsolved” (28 December 2025) — the funeral gathering and the lights at Deepak Singh’s house, the eyewitness accounts of Torit Banerjee and Subhash Tantu Bai, the weapons recovered, the White House and Kim Davy’s escape.

Homegrown, “The Night It Rained Guns: Unpacking The 1995 Purulia Arms Drop Mystery” (29 May 2025) — the aircraft, its crew and its route through Karachi and Varanasi.

Republic World, “What is Purulia arms drop case?” (23 February 2022) — the villages where the weapons fell.