After Meerut, yet another racket of luring aspirants for recruitment in the Army under the Agniveer scheme was busted by the police in Muzaffarnagar district.
The Agniveer recruitment is presently underway in Meerut and Muzaffarnagar.
The breakthrough was made on the tips provided by the sleuths of the Army Intelligence and the cops arrested four of the accused on Friday. The police recovered fake mark sheets, Aadhaar cards, identity cards and Rs 2,35,000 the accused had collected from the aspirants. According to reports, the cops of the Muzaffarnagar police acted on the inputs provided by the Army Intelligence from Meerut and laid a trap on four of the accused identified as Sikander, Prashant Chaudhary, Anuj Choudhary and Himanshu Choudhary.
The gang was providing fake documents to youths appearing for Agniveer recruitment. The police have recovered a fake mark sheet, Aadhaar card, identity card and Rs 2.35 lakh in cash from the accused who are natives of Baghpat, Moradabad and Sambhal districts. The police said the accused provided fake documents to the youth coming in for Agniveer recruitment. The gang used to charge anything between Rs 1.5 lakh to Rs 2 lakh from those taking its services. One of these accused is an advocate, and he is said to be the mastermind of the gang. He used to make all necessary fake documents required for eligibility for recruitment as Agniveer while the other three trapped youths who were ready to pay money to get the certificates.
The cops said that so far this gang had been able to trap two to three candidates who came for Agniveer recruitment, but many more youths were in touch with the gang. Before the gang could cheat them, the police conducted raids and arrested all the four gang members.
The police officials said that they would seek police custody of the accused to grill them and extract details of other gang members besides whether they also provided similar fake certificates for recruitment in other places.
Superintendent of Police (City) Arpit Vijayvargiya said that the gang mainly targeted older candidates who were age-barred and were in need of certificates showing them younger as per the eligibility for recruitment as Agniveer.