CHENNAI: K.S.B. Thangal, a Kerala Congress leader and former Chairman of the Pattambi Municipality, was held by CISF officials at the Coimbatore International Airport on Tuesday morning after a revolver and seven rounds of live ammunition were detected in his luggage. He was turned over to Peelamedu police to be investigated further.
The Congress leader was scheduled to fly from Coimbatore to Bengaluru and then to Amritsar, Punjab, aboard an Indigo flight.
Thangal told the CISF that he had no idea the revolver was in his luggage. Officials from the CISF told reporters that the Congress leader lacked the necessary paperwork to carry a revolver on an aeroplane. He told the cops that he had been the secretary of the Muslim Educational Society (MES) school in Pattambi for 15 years and that he was going to Amritsar to buy clothes for the children.
On February 16, 2007, CISF officers questioned Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, who was then acting as the CPI-Marxist Kerala state secretary, when they discovered five live bullets in his hand luggage at Chennai airport.
Vijayan had spent the night in Chennai on his way to New Delhi for a meeting of the CPI-M Politburo. When he was leaving here for New Delhi, he was interrogated.
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