Ayodhya police claimed to have made a major breakthrough by arresting four miscreants for fraudulent withdrawal of Rs 6 lakh from Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trusts bank account in September. The kingpin, however, is yet to be held.
Confirming the news of the arrest, Ayodhya DIG Deepak Kumar claimed on Wednesday that they were making all-out efforts to trap the prime accused after extracting whereabouts of the gang leader from his arrested accomplices.
According to the police, the amount was transferred to the PNB in Maharashtra from Ayodhya’s State Bank of India using two cloned cheques of Rs 2.5 lakh and Rs 3.5 lakh with the forged signatures of the trustees. The scam was busted after a third cloned cheque was intercepted at a SBI clearing house in Lucknow.
The withdrawal was made on September 1 but the Trust was in the dark about the fraudulent withdrawals till a third cloned cheque of Rs 9.86 lakh was presented at a Bank of Baroda’s branch and sent to SBI for clearing after a week. Alarm bells rang when a senior bank official intercepted the cheque and made repeated calls to Trust secretary Champat Rai to verify whether he had signed on the high-value cheque.
The transaction was stopped immediately after Rai confirmed that he did not approve of any withdrawal and the account was seized. An FIR was lodged at the Ayodhya police station on September 10.
Those arrested have been identified as Prashant Mahaval Shetty (40), resident of Bombay, Vimal Lalla (40), Shankar Sitaram Gopale (54) and Sanjay Tejraj (35) all from Thane district of Maharashtra. However, the mastermind of this scam hailing from Varanasi is still absconding. The Ayodhya DIG said that the involvement of bank employees in this fraud cannot be ruled out. All the held accused will be now taken on police custody remand to grill them and extract details of others involved in the crime.