Mumbai: Three lower-rung Indian Army personnel have come under the scanner of the Thane police after inquiries indicated their involvement in the Army question paper leak scam, officials confirmed on Tuesday.
The lid was blown off the scam in the early hours of Sunday when the crime branch of the Thane police, in simultaneous raids in Pune, Nagpur and Goa, arrested a total of 18 people who were selling copies of the leaked question papers to aspirants. Three more were later arrested, and all the 21 accused are in police custody.
Crime branch officials told The Hindu that the arrested had named three junior personnel with the Indian Army as their associates, and that their involvement in the racket is now being investigated.
“The accused, including Santosh Shinde, who first got the question paper on WhatsApp and then passed it on to his accomplices, have named these three servicemen during their interrogation. We are contacting the Army Recruitment Board and seeking a list of all those who had access to the question papers,” said an officer who is part of the investigation.
The officer said Shinde, who was heading the Nagpur module of the racket, seems to have been in charge of all the arrested, and was in direct touch with the person who leaked the question paper.
“We have the number through which the question paper was sent via WhatsApp, and are conducting inquiries. The question papers are sent in CDs to examination centres and are printed only a few hours before the exams, which means that a copy was sent to Shinde as soon as they were printed or may be even before they were printed, indicating that the person who leaked it had access to the soft copy on the CD. We are finding out when exactly the question papers were printed at the three centres,” the officer said.
Meanwhile, interrogation of the accused has revealed that they would only accept payment in cash to ensure that they left no trail for the authorities to follow.
Well-organised racket
“Since the accused had the educational certificates of the aspirants as surety, they even gave them the option of paying them after they had cleared the exams, which is another indicator of how well-organised the racket was,” the officer said.
