It rained guns on a cold wintry night exactly 10 years ago in Purulia, a remote part of India's West Bengal province. But even after a decade, the parachuting of hundreds of AK-47 rifles, ammunition and rocket-launchers from a cargo plane is still one big, unsolved riddle.
Too many nagging questions are unanswered. The mystery remains, although some of the perpetrators of what came to be known as the Purulia arms-drop case were arrested and jailed after a marathon trial.
The entire operation was apparently planned and funded by two Hong Kong-based businessmen holding British passports. But these masterminds - whose identities are known to Hong Kong and Indian police - were never caught: they melted into the shadows never to emerge.
Speaking exclusively to the South China Morning Post on Monday, India's ex-army chief General Shankar Roychowdhury - who was the chief of army staff from November 1994 to October 1997 - vehemently criticised key findings of the federal government's powerful Central Bureau of Investigation - India's FBI - which probed the arms-drop case and imprisoned all those it could lay its hands on.
As many as 548 assault rifles, 11.3 tonnes of ammunition, anti-tank weapons and 165 rocket launchers packed in wooden crates were dropped from a Russian-made plane over Purulia on the night of December 17, 1995. The huge arms consignment landed not too far away from the international headquarters of Ananda Marga (Path of Bliss), a Hindu cult with a history of animosity with West Bengal's ruling communists.
Amid an unprecedented national uproar, the arms drop was dubbed the biggest crime in the history of India. Initially, nuclear rival Pakistan was accused of smuggling weapons to arm secessionist rebels in India's restive northeast. But five days later, the AN-26 plane, which flew to Phuket, Thailand, after dropping the cache of arms, mysteriously landed in Mumbai, giving an altogether new twist to the drama.