The City Police busted a gang involved in fabricating fake nativity certificates for passport aspirants and arrested five persons in this connection, including the kingpin Pollipali Suribabu, who is working as Pachayat Secretary and also Registrar of Births and Deaths of Dharmavaram Panchayat in Vizianagaram district, here on Friday.
The others arrested were Saripalli Santosh, out-sourcing Technical Assistant (data entry operator) in the Dharmavaram Panchayat and three passport agents M. Satish, Shaik Rahim and K. Naresh.
The offence came to light a few days back when Passport Officer N.L.P. Choudary observed that about 80 applicants for passports claimed themselves to be natives of Dharmavaram, small village in Vizianagaram district, as per the nativity certificate enclosed with the application.
Suspecting something was wrong, Mr. Choudary approached DGP N. Sambasiva Rao and the case was transferred to Commissioner of Police T. Yoganand. The Commissioner deputed a team from the City Task Force led by ACP I. Chittibabu to investigate into the case.
As per a Government of India rule, applicants born after January 26, 1989, have to submit nativity certificate. And since many who were born after the date had moved to city and other places, it was not possible for them to easily obtain the nativity certificate from their native villages.
Five passport agents Sumanth, Jagan, Raju, Srinivasa Rao, Satish, Rahim and Naresh, and Suribabu and Santosh, started obtaining fabricated nativity certificates from the Panchayat office at Dharmavaram for those needing the certificates and they were charging Rs. 3,000 to Rs. 5,000, depending on the urgency of the candidates, said ACP CTF I. Chittibabu.
According to Joint Commissioner of Visakhapatnam City Police A.S. Khan, of the 80 applicants identified so far, passports have been issued to about 60 persons.
They gang has been working for the last two years and as per their confession they have fraudulently fabricated about 300 nativity certificates.
The CTF and the Airport Police Station are investigating the case and once all the persons who have obtained passports through such wrongful means are identified, action will be initiated against them also and their passports will be cancelled.
The arrested have been booked under IPC Sections 462, 420, 468 and 471.
