The Gujarat police on Wednesday arrested a priest from temple premises at Sayla village of with 102 counterfeit currency notes of the denomination of Rs1000.
On the basis of tip-off, Ahmedabad Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) personnel raided the temple and arrested the priest Shailesh Raval with fake currency notes from Sayla, situated around 130 km from Ahmedabad. According to ATS officials, Raval had also printed counterfeit notes. The investigating team came to know about the racket of printing counterfeit notes through the interrogation of another person from near Vadodara last week from whose possession they had recovered a few notes. The racket was busted following the police finding counterfeit notes having same serial numbers.
“The Sayla raid was the biggest catch of counterfeit notes of the denomination of Rs1000 from Gujarat in recent times,” said a police official who was part of the search operation. Earlier, the police had suspected that counterfeit currency was being pushed into the State from neighboring Pakistan. However, this is for the first time police found that counterfeit currency note racket is not limited to neighboring country but it is being operated in the country too. According to police, Raval is just a small fish in the fake currency note racket and they are trying to nab key players involved in printing, distributing and tactfully pushing these fake notes in circulation.