The Hindu : New Delhi News : Police custody for paper leak accused

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Apr 22, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

Police custody for paper leak accused

By Our Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI, APRIL 21. Ranjit Verma and his brother Satinder, prime accused in the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) All-India Pre-Medical Test paper leak, were remanded to nine-day police custody by a Delhi court today. The police were also granted four-day custody of another accused, Kuldeep Tyagi, for further interrogation.

In their remand application seeking custody of Ranjit and Satinder, the police said whatever they had found in the case so far was just the tip of the iceberg and there was a need to interrogate the brothers and confront them with the other accused to gather clues facilitating the unravelling of the whole racket and identification of other culprits.

The police said it appeared to be a much bigger racket, and there were apparently several other centres set up across the country to leak the PMT papers, like the one at New Ashok Nagar being handled by Banni Singh Gautam at the instance of Ranjit. Investigations have indicated that the papers were leaked either from Nagpur in Maharashtra or Dhanbad in Jharkhand.

The police also want to interrogate Ranjit and Satinder to identify and trace the two experts they had hired for solving the papers. They suspect that the experts were from the Aakash Coaching Centre where Satinder had got enrolled apparently for preparation of the entrance examination. The police said during interrogation, Vikas, who was arrested along with another accused, Rakesh, from the New Ashok Nagar centre while he was distributing the papers among 13 candidates, told them that on April 10, Ranjit had taken him to the Ghaziabad residence of the accused, Kuldeep Tyagi, in a Santro car. There he saw two men working on question papers. He also heard Ranjit directing Kuldeep to pay Rs. 20,000 each to the experts and take care of their other needs.

After hearing the arguments, the court also granted the Crime Branch Kuldeep's custody of Kuldeep Tyagi, who was arrested for allegedly providing his premises to Ranjit to solve the question papers a day before the examination was to be conducted. Kuldeep has so far revealed that he and Ranjit were classmates in a Shakarpur school and had done their Xth in Commerce stream. Kuldeep, who ran a middle school at Ghaziabad, also confessed that he had information of the paper leak racket being run by Ranjit.

While two other accused, Vikas and Rakesh, are still in police custody, the Crime Branch police would confront all of the five accused to corroborate their statements and further investigate into the chain of the racket.

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