The city police has claimed to have busted a racket which allegedly was involved in defrauding candidates of the Uttarakhand Pre-Medical Test (UPMT) examination. Acting on a tip-off, a police team swooped on a hotel late on Saturday night and arrested six people in connection with the fraud. The team has seized cheques worth `1.40 crore, cash of `93,000, a laptop and a car from their possession.
Informing mediapersons about the police action at his office on Sunday, the Superintendent of Police (City), Ajay Singh said that culprits allegedly allured the medical aspirants with the assurance that they would provide them the question paper of the elite examination and collected money. He said police acted on a complaint of one, Farhan Gaur, a resident of Jwalapur, Haridwar.
Taking a serious note of the complaint, the Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Dehradun, constituted a combined team of police and Special Operation Group (SOG). The SP city, however, added that in preliminary investigation it appeared that the racket was only involved in fooling aspirants to collect money as they received no email containing the question paper as promised to the gullible students by them. He said two out of the six arrested worked in a placement agency.
Interestingly, one of the culprits, Komal Chand Gupta, is a second year student of a medical college in Maharashtra.
Informing newsmen, Gupta said one Manish asked him to be part of the group and offered him `50,000 for every student. The group reportedly offered the question paper of UPMT for `22 lakh and kept original documents of the candidates with them as security. The other members of the racket are Ashutosh Tiwari of Pratapgarh (UP), Nishikant of lalitpur (UP), Rohit Verga of lohianagar (UP), Arsalan Siddiqui of Kanpur (UP) and Anjay Kumar of district Unnao in UP.
It is learnt that alarmed senior officials of the HNB Uttarakhand Medical Education University rushed to the police station where the culprits were interrogated by the police.
Sources informed that the university entrusted with the conduct of the examination changed the sets of the question paper to ward off any chance of leak.
The police team consisted of Sub Inspector (SI), SOG, Ravindra Yadav, SI Naresh Rathore of Kotwali PS, SI Vicky Tamta SOG and others.