Senior Indian Army officers are questioning a senior officer from one of the units of the 20 Madras Regiment in connection with the Secunderabad Cantonment arms heist case, .

Officers of the Telangana Police have also questioned the officer, it is learnt.

The officer is being questioned because the armoury’s books or registers were allegedly not maintained for months.

Twelve weapons, including four AK-203 assault rifles, seven pistols and an INSAS rifle, had been stolen from the high-security Secunderabad Cantonment near Hyderabad in Telangana. More than 1,000 rounds of ammunition and a pair of passive night-vision binoculars were also found stolen.

The incident came to light around 7:50 am on August 31.

A top-ranking Army officer lodged a police complaint with the Bollaram police station in Malkajgiri commissionerate, stating that the theft was detected when the ammunition storage was found open and the locks broken.

Upon verification of relevant weapon and ammunition accounting documents, it was found that some of them were not available against the recorded holdings, and the locks on the boxes where the weapons and ammunition were stored were forcibly broken. The weapons and ammunition were last physically accounted for on August 30 at 6 pm, prior to the closing of Kote and Battalion Magazine.

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While the police suspected that the robbery took place during the intervening night of August 30 and 31, sources told that it was not possible to account for the weapons even prior to this night, allegedly because “the records were not maintained properly”. This led police to probe the theory that the theft might have happened prior to the alleged break-in.

“The Kote is always guarded and the guards maintain that they have not seen a break-in. While this statement is being examined, when we checked the records of the armoury, it was found that these were not maintained,” a senior police officer said, adding that weapons in an armoury are supposed to be accounted for each evening.