The STF probing the U.P. Police constable exam question paper leak had now directed its focus on the capture and arrest of the two men responsible, said senior officials in the police department on Sunday.
Rajiv Nayan Mishra and Ravi Attri, the key accused in the leak, ran an inter-state nexus of fraudsters and had turned leaking question papers of exams into an enterprise, they added.
A senior police official privy to the investigation said Mishra and Attri were on the run after the news of the paper leak surfaced in the media. He said the arrest of the two masterminds would help crack the entire nexus of these inter-state solvers’ gangs involved in the leaks of different recruitment examination question papers in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi.
The official said Mishra was also involved in the question paper leak of RO/ARO exam conducted by the UPPSC on February 11, UP Teachers’ Eligibility Test (TET) held in 2021 and Madhya Pradesh staff nurse exam in 2023.
Ravi Attri, meanwhile, is an MBBS degree holder who was also involved in the Madhya Pradesh staff nurse exam paper leak of 2015.
{{/usCountry}}Ravi Attri, meanwhile, is an MBBS degree holder who was also involved in the Madhya Pradesh staff nurse exam paper leak of 2015.
{{/usCountry}}On Saturday, the STF had arrested a key member of their gang, Shubham Mandal, an MBBS doctor, from Meerut. Mandal, who hails from Bihar, was the one who took pictures of two sets of the question paper at the Ahmedabad warehouse of a transport company hired by the printing agency.
On Friday, Rohit Kumar Pandey, Shivam Giri and a former employee of the transport company, Abhishek Shukla, were arrested by the STF from Ghaziabad after which Mandal and the two masterminds’ names surfaced.
As many as 397 people have been arrested so far in 178 FIRs lodged in 41 districts of U.P. in connection with the leak.
On February 24, UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath asked the STF to investigate the paper leak after cancelling the examination held for 60,244 posts.