The sleuths of the Uttar Pradesh Anti-Terrorist Squad (UP ATS) claimed to have arrested the mastermind of a gang involved in issuing fake or forged birth and death certificates.
The accused was wanted by the ATS after it registered a case in this regard.
The ATS will now seek police custody remand of the accused to further grill him and extract the names of others, including government officials, involved in the racket.
According to an official communiqué of the ATS released on Sunday evening, on July 17, 2024 they registered an FIR (No. 327/2024) under Sections 319, 318, 336, 340, 337, 338 of Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita in Salon police station of Rae Bareli district in connection with the issuance of a large number of fake birth or death certificates. The documents were issued from the ID password of the Birth-Death Certificate Portal of the gram vikas officer in the Salon police station.
The ATS late in the night of July 18, 2024, arrested the accused Vijay Singh Yadav, Zeeshan Khan, Suhail and Riyaz Khan. Again on August 2, the ATS nabbed Govind Keshari, Akash Kasodhan, Salman Ali alias Salman Guru, Sanjeev Kumar Singh, Vaibhav Upadhyay and Shahnawaz. A day later, Arif Ali, Shahnawaz, Dheeraj Kumar, Rajan alias Devmani, Neeraj, Armaan and Satish Kumar Soni were arrested by the ATS team and sent to judicial custody by Rae Bareli police.
The above-mentioned accused, during interrogation, had revealed the name of the mastermind of the gang as Ravikesh of Bihar after which the ATS put him on the wanted list and a reward of Rs. 25,000 was also announced on him by the superintendent of police of Rae Bareli.
The ATS sleuths were monitoring the movement of Ravikesh through electronic and physical surveillance for his arrest. The ATS team on Sunday learnt that the wanted accused was coming to Lucknow and the sleuths set a trap and arrested the accused.
During interrogation, Ravikesh revealed that he created the portal ‘www.crsogovr.in’ in 2022 and the portal ‘www.thedashboard.in’ in 2023 to make fake certificates and through his Facebook page, he included many people of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in his fake certificate making gang, which also included many CSC operators.
There are about 4,100 users on its portal, out of which 1500 are active users, who are also permanent customers, through whom he used to earn Rs 2,000 to Rs 3,000 per day. He and his users have made about four lakh fake birth certificates and about five thousand fake death certificates of customers from various districts of many states.
In 2022 itself, the accused started receiving different usernames and passwords of the government portal ‘www.crsorgi.gov.in’ from various members of his gang, on which certificates were prepared after entering the OTP. Through the government portal also, the accused and other members of his gang have made thousands of fake birth and death certificates so far.
Interrogation of the arrested accused has also revealed names of other suspects, who have made birth and death certificates by misusing the original ID and password of the gram vikas adhikari. They are on the radar of UP ATS.
Further legal action against Ravikesh, a resident of Biuni village under Bahadurpur police station of Darbhanga district in Bihar is being taken by the Rae Bareli police.
