Patna: Engineering graduates among six sent to jail

PATNA: Three engineering graduates from IIT-Kharagpur, NIT-Patna and NIT-Bhopal were among six arrested on Friday night for allegedly running an interstate racket to help aspirants crack the entrance examinations by sending scholars in place of the candidates themselves in return for huge amount of money.
They were arrested from a flat in Vindhyachal Apartment on Boring Road under Buddha Colony in the city and sent to jail on Sunday.Among those arrested, Rohit Kumar was a passout from IIT-Kharagpur while Ramesh Kumar Singh and Ujjwal Kashyap had graduated from NIT-Patna and NIT-Bhopal, respectively. Prashant Kumar had passed out from a Bhagalpur engineering college while Nitesh Kumar and Saurabh Suman had studied BBA from Cimage College in Patna. Police said Ujjwal, the mastermind, was running the racket with the help of one Atul Vats, who is an accused in some cases lodged in Delhi, Haryana and Rajasthan in 2017 and 2018 for running a similar racket there.
Police said they used to charge Rs1.5 to 2 lakh from candidates for making them clear the NEET and other entrance examinations besides tests conducted for recruitment in central and state government jobs and others.
Patna SSP Upendra Kumar Sharma said, “Initially, police thought someone might be actually conducting examination for small group of students in order to maintain social distancing. However, when police went to flat number 11B for verification, things looked suspicious after which all six were detained and brought to the police station.”
He said all six were interrogated till Saturday night after which an FIR was lodged against them.
Police said a Harley Davidson bike, costly watches and cellphones, two bank passbooks and debit cards, eight chequebooks, two filled cheques carrying total amount of Rs6 lakh, three blank cheques, original educational documents of 13 candidates, four laptops, one CPU, two hard drives and five pen drives were recovered from their possession.
Police also said the bike was in Ujjwal’s name and registered in Jharkhand. Police said Delhi police’s Special Operation Group case documents against Atul were also recovered from the flat.
Patna City SP (central) Vinay Tiwari said the racketeers had managed to replace the actual candidates with scholars in the engineering entrance examination conducted by private university last week. “They replaced at least 10 candidates with scholars,” he said.
Tiwari said they also used to sit as scholars for the purpose. “Police is gathering details about their bank accounts,” he added.