Dummy candidate racket: SIT nabs cop who tried to scuttle probe, ‘bribed’ CID fingerprint expert
THE Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the state Criminal Investigation Department (CID), which is probing the statewide dummy candidate racket, has arrested another police officer, who was with the Nanded police in 2016 and allegedly tried to scuttle the probe by bribing a fingerprint expert of the CID.
The CID on Sunday arrested assistant inspector Dinesh Sonaskar, who was evading arrest since long. CID Superintendent of Police Shankar Kengar, who heads the SIT, told The Indian Express, “Sonaskar was with the Economic Offences Wing of the Nanded police when they were probing the case back in June 2016. The kingpin in the case had then allegedly approached Sonaskar. The duo had then approached the dummy candidates and the real candidates to redo their signatures so as to alter records with the fingerprint expert. The racketeers even allegedly called all these people together in Aurangabad for two days to redo all the signatures. Sonaskar allegedly played a key role in protecting the racketeers when he was supposed to probe them. He has been remanded in police custody for five days.”
The CID now expects the names of more conspirators to emerge. The Indian Express recently reported that the CID probe had till now revealed the names of 46 serving government officials, who have been recruited in various state departments over a five-year period after impersonators provided by the racketeers appeared for them in the recruitment exams. The CID had till now arrested seven accused, including kingpin Prabodh Rathod, a dismissed government employee from Nanded, three serving government officials who appeared as dummy candidates, a CID handwriting expert, a constable who was part of the initial probe and the owner of a coaching class in Latur.
In April this year, the state government had formed the SIT. The SIT was given the mandate to probe around 50 cases registered across Maharashtra, including 10 in Pune. As per the primary estimate of the investigators, the number of cases in which dummy candidates are suspected to have appeared is over 400 over the last six years, of whom around 46 have been recruited as per a primary probe.
Several recruitments in departments like the police, social welfare, government secretariat, agriculture and women and child development are now under the SIT scanner. For each selected candidate, the racketeers were paid anywhere between Rs 5 lakh to Rs 10 lakh and a significant chunk of the money went to the impersonators.
A 27-year-old political science graduate, Yogesh Jadhav from Nanded, who is preparing for the civil services examinations, had first unearthed the series of impersonation cases by filing several RTI applications, which led to the statewide probe by the CID SIT.
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