Gold Medal Winning Woman Shooter in India Stops Kidnapping with Licensed Pistol (what model?)

Link to video of interview on Youtube

Ayisha Falaq is a competitive shooter in India.  On the 25th of May, she used her licensed .32 ACP handgun to rescue her brother in law from kidnappers in a village, Bhopra near to the Haryana border.  It was an impressive achievement. Ayisha is being lauded in the Indian and international media.

From ndtv.com:

New Delhi: A national-level shooter, 33-year-old Ayisha Falaq, has been handling guns for the last six years. But last week, she took up her licensed revolver for the first time to counter crime after her 21-year-old brother-in-law Asif Falaq, was abducted. Ms Falaq, the police said, fired two bullets at two men - one bullet grazed a man, another man was shot in the foot.

(snip)

With a police vehicle on their tail, Ms Falaq and her husband reached the kidnappers. It was decided that she would be the one handing over the money. The rendezvous point was near the village at post-midnight.

Ms Falaq, who won gold in 2015, carried her .32 bore licensed revolver with her.

"They had started suspecting that we had the police with us," said Ms Falaq. As soon as her husband parked his car parallel to theirs, they started shouting 'kill them', she said. "They came out of the car and it was then that I shot them at their feet," she said.

 Reporters in India are even less informed about firearms than reporters in the U.S.A. It is obvious that Ayisha's pistol is a semi-auto.  Nothing larger than a .32 is authorized under Indian law (there are always exceptions).  What is the model of pistol that Ayisha used? It looks much like a Browning BDA. But there are anomalies. The barrel, where it locks into the slide, appears relatively square, like a Glock.  The end of the slide seems rebated for a greater distance than the BDA. If you look at the top picture, the frame appears to be composite, with a squared off trigger guard.

 

Here is another picture:

 Is this the pistol she used in the rescue? Is it a prop for the interview? One account said that her pistol was confiscated by police. It seems unlikely that she would get it back so quickly. If this pistol is a prop, it is a very, very good one.

Importation of pistols is not allowed in India, at  least for civilians. There is a small stock of foreign made pistols that are grandfathered.  They are extremely expensive. Still, the Indian bureaucracy is notoriously corrupt.

Could it be a copy, made in India or Pakistan?

Perhaps an alert reader can make the connection to a commercially manufactured pistol.

Update: readers, including  Virgal Bressner and Kovacs Jeno from The Truth About Guns have I.D.ed the pistol in the images as a Walther P22. Because it is in India, it is likely the 9mm blank firing variant. It is likely being used as prop in the photos because the actual pistol is in police custody.

The actual pistol used is likely the Indian manufactured Ashani .32 ACP semi-auto (from goodboy_mentor) on indiansforguns.com.

©2017 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.

Gun Watch