NIT graduate among 2 held in NEET-UG paper leak

Aksheev Thakur

New Delhi, July 16

The CBI on Tuesday arrested two persons, including an NIT-Jamshedpur graduate, for their alleged involvement in stealing and distributing the NEET-UG question paper.

Pankaj Kumar, who graduated from the NIT-Jamshedpur in civil engineering in 2017, is suspected to have stolen the paper from a trunk of the National Testing Agency (NTA) in Hazaribagh. He was arrested from Patna. His accomplice, Rajkumar Singh, alias Raju Singh, who is accused of having distributed the leaked paper, was caught in Jamshedpur. Officials said Pankaj Kumar had broken the seal of the trunk and stolen the paper before it reached the Oasis school in Hazaribagh.

“Different sets of question papers were dispatched from the SBI, Hazaribagh, to centres in the city. The set which reached the Oasis school centre had its seal broken. The staff there did not raise the alarm and, thus, their role is established. Pankaj Kumar is suspected to have broken the seal of the trunk and stolen the question paper set. His accomplice later distributed the papers,” a senior official said.

As reported by The Tribune earlier, the Economic Offences Unit of the Bihar Police, which was initially investigating the irregularities in the NEET-UG examination, had in its report zeroed in on the Oasis school in Hazaribagh as the epicentre of the question paper leak.

The Bihar Police had recovered a burnt question paper on May 4, a day before the examination was conducted, at the hostel of Learn and Play School in Patna. A month later, the Bihar Police were informed by the NTA that the booklet number of the burnt question paper was from the Oasis school.

Later, the CBI arrested the principal of the Oasis school, Dr Ehsanul Haque, who was also the district coordinator for the NEET-UG examination in Hazaribagh, and vice-principal Imtiaz Alam, who was the centre coordinator.

The CBI has made 60 arrests so far from Gujarat, Bihar, Jharkhand and Kolkata.

On July 10, the CBI had arrested Rakesh Ranjan, alias Rocky, from Nalanda in Bihar. Rocky had arranged MBBS students from Patna and Ranchi to solve the NEET paper. A close aide of Sanjeev Mukhiya, one of the prime accused in the case, Rocky was planning to flee to Nepal.