An illegal arms manufacturing unit was busted in Nimta on the city’s northern fringes and two persons were arrested on Wednesday night.

Pistols and revolvers were being manufactured at the factory, around 16km from the heart of Calcutta, CID sources said. One of the arrested persons is a “receiver” who had gone to buy weapons and the other the owner of the unit.

The raid was carried out by the CID’s special operation group based on a specific input from the subsidiary intelligence branch in Calcutta, sources said.

“Arms, some of them in the process of being manufactured, have been seized from the arrested duo. All the equipment used at the unit have been seized,” a CID officer said. The haul included one five-chamber countrymade gun which appeared complete with a trigger, firing pin, barrel and fitted with wooden butt loaded with one empty cartridge, one improvised single-shot, a manual drilling machine, six springs of different sizes and other lead and iron cutting equipment.

The unit had been operative at Sridurgapally, a remote neighbourhood of Nimta, for over the past two years, investigations have revealed.

The prime accused — identified as Dulal Sarkar, 68, — had rented the house where he was running the unit. The receiver was identified as Prankrishna Gain, 53, from Dum Dum. They were produced in court on Thursday and remanded in police custody for 10 days.

The police suspect that some of the arms consignments were meant for supply across the India-Bangladesh border. The special task force of Calcutta police had unearthed an illegal arms manufacturing and assembling unit at Pilkhana in Howrah last year and seized a cache of arms.