The Bihar Police has arrested five people in the NEET paper leak case, which takes the total number of people arrested in the case to 18 now in the state. The arrests were made by the Bihar Police’s Economic Offenses Unit.
The development comes after the Centre ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to takeover the probe into the alleged discrepancies in the NEET-UG examination. The agency after taking up the case has dispatched its teams to several states for investigation.
A row has erupted after the paper leak case emerged with pressure mounting on the National Testing Agency (NTA)—the agency responsible for holding the competitive examinations. NTA is receiving flak over the cancellation and postponement of several competitive examinations.
The agency has debarred 17 students from examination centers in Bihar after detection of “malpractices”, with a total of 110 students having faced similar action since the row erupted.
Bihar Police unravels paper leak plot:
The Bihar police arrested five people from Jharkhand's Deoghar late on Sunday evening. The five arrested people are said to residents of Nalanda. The police has said the members of the Mukhiya gang, accused of orchestrating multiple interstate paper leaks, were the source of the leaked answer sheet.
On Sunday evening, the five accused arrested by Bihar Police have been indentified as Baldev Kumar, Mukesh Kumar, Panku Kumar, Rajeev Kumar and Paramjeet Singh.
Baldev Kumar is said to be associated with the notorious Sanjeev Kumar alias Lutan Mukhiya gang.
The police said Baldev Kumar allegedly received the solved answer sheet of the NEET-UG exam in PDF format on his mobile phone a day before the examination on May 5.
Baldev and his associates printed the answer sheet to students who gathered at a safe house in Patna's Ram Krishna Nagar on May 4.
The police said Nitish Kumar and Amit Anand, who were arrested earlier, had brought the students to the safe house.
The NEET-UG question paper was obtained from a private school in Hazaribagh, Jharkhand, by the Mukhiya gang, said the police.
The police said they have also recovered partially burnt question paper at the Patna safe house, which they have matched the paper with the reference question paper provided by the National Testing Agency (NTA), thus confirming the leak's origin.
