₹2,500 charged for CBSE paper

Booty shared among the 3 accused: police

Students shout slogans against HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar over the paper leak, in Amritsar on Sunday.

The 26-year-old tutor, Tauqeer Ahmed Hasan, who was arrested along with schoolteachers Rishabh Antil and Rohit Vats for allegedly leaking the Class 12 economics question paper, failed to delete the WhatsApp conversations between them, which helped the police crack the case.

An officer, who is a member of the Special Investigating Team headed by Deputy Commissioner of Police Ram Gopal Naik which cracked the case, said that it was the WhatsApp conversation details which led them to prove Mr. Antil and Mr. Vats’ involvement.

“When the teachers’ phones were checked, they had deleted all the conversations pertaining to the question paper but Tauqeer had them on his phone,” he said. Though, Mr. Hasan had deleted the images of the question paper from his phone, the police team found the images in the chat history.

Sources said that Mr. Hasan did not delete the conversations to keep a record of the people to whom he had sent the questions. The probe, so far, has revealed that he used to ask for money from students. “Tauqeer, on an average, used to ask for ₹2,500 from a student. The booty was then shared among the three,” the officer, said adding that in some of the conversations examined by the police, he had asked for a “party” too.

According to a senior police officer, Mr. Antil and Mr. Hasan knew each other for the past couple of years as they used to teach in the same private school. Mr. Hasan later started taking tuitions, while Mr. Antil continued to teach in the school.

The officer said that it was suspected that the teachers had shared the mathematics question paper, too, with Mr. Hasan on March 21. However, there’s no evidence for the same at the time. “Rishabh and Rohit were on vigilance duty in the school on March 21. It’s suspected that Rishabh had shared the mathematics question paper with Tauqeer. On March 26, he wasn’t on duty so he asked Rohit to send it [economics paper] to Tauqeer. Rohit and Tauqeer don’t know each other well,” the officer said.

The police said the teachers could have also called their students before the examination to tell them what could possibly appear in the examination, allegedly to earn a good name.