E-Paper
Constable exam paper leak: Haryana resort owner aided ‘masterminds’, arrested, says STF
The accused, Satish Dhankad, is a resident of and owns a resort that goes by the name Nature Valley Resort at Manesar, officials said in a press note.
Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force has arrested a key accused in the police constable exam paper leak case from Manesar in Haryana’s Gurugram, said STF officials on Friday.
The accused, Satish Dhankad, is a resident of and owns a resort that goes by the name Nature Valley Resort at Manesar, the officials said in a press note. Dhankad was later brought to Kankarkheda police station of Meerut.
Dhankad was in direct touch with one of the two ‘masterminds’ of the leak, Ravi Attri, and a former employee of the Ahmedabad agency hired to print the question papers, Abhishek Shukla, the officials said. While Shukla was arrested earlier, Attri and the other mastermind Rajiv Nayan Mishra were still at large.
‘800 aspirants had access to papers 24 hrs before exam’
Dhankad had allowed around 800 constable aspirants, who were given the leaked question papers, to stay at his resort. At the resort, the aspirants got to practice solving the questions around 24 hours before the examination was scheduled to begin on February 17, the STF officials said.
A senior police official privy to the investigation said Mishra and Attri had been on the run after the news of the paper leak surfaced in the media. He said their arrests might help crack the entire nexus of inter-state solvers’ gangs involved in the leaks of different recruitment examination question papers in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi.
On March 16, the STF arrested a key member of their gang, Shubham Mandal--an MBBS doctor, in Meerut. Mandal, who hails from Bihar, was the one who took pictures of two sets of the question paper at the Ahmedabad warehouse of the transport company hired by the printing agency.
398 arrested so far in case
As many as 398 people have been arrested so far in 178 FIRs lodged in 41 districts of U.P. in connection with the constable exam paper leak. On February 24, UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath asked the STF to investigate the leaks while also cancelling the exam held for recruitment to 60,244 posts.
