NEW DELHI: A student of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences was arrested on Monday in a case of suspected fraud in the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) in May.Naresh Vashnoi was arrested when he had come to the campus to appear for a supplementary exam.
Police said he and his associates had taken several lakhs of rupees from some NEET aspirants to appear for them in the exams.
They tampered documents to make the fake candidate seem real but their lie got exposed when the biometrics of a fake candidate did not match the biometrics of the real aspirant at an exam centre.One of Vashnoi's associates was arrested in May.
The Monday arrest is the second one in the case in Delhi.
Nagpur police have arrested two persons in the same case.
Two others are untraceable.Police said that a group of AIIMS students had told NEET aspirants that they could help them get good scores.
The group used to charge Rs 5-7 lakh from each candidate and sent in their gang members to appear in the exams.Delhi Police said that on May 7, they received a PCR call regarding a case of possible candidate impersonation in a school in RK Puram, Sector 4, an exam centre.During the exam, one of the invigilators had informed the National Testing Agency (NTA) that the biometrics of candidate Aman Kumar did not match with the biometrics available in his records.
"The biometrics of the candidate were rechecked and they did not match with the Aadhaar data of the candidate," an officer said.The police started an inquiry.
They found out that the person who had come for the exam was Sanju Yadav from Jaipur in Rajasthan.
He had posed as Aman Kumar.A case was registered and Yadav was apprehended.
After questioning him, the police found out that he was a second-year student of BSc Radio-Diagnosis at AIIMS."Yadav said that his classmate and roommate, Vashnoi from Jodhpur, had told him that a person was offering him money to appear for the NEET exam in place of someone else," an officer said.Yadav told the investigators that for taking the exam, Rs 6 lakh was offered to him.
The gang edited the photograph of Kumar on his Aadhaar card and pasted Yadav's photograph on Kumar's admit card."We seized Yadav's phone and found WhatsApp chats between him and Vashnoi, and a soft copy of Kumar's admit card," a police source said.The police raided Vashnoi's rented accommodation at Masjid Moth, near AIIMS, but he had left.
The cops brought out a non-bailable warrant on Vashnoi.Vashnoi's account was frozen, and on Monday he was caught.Of the suspects yet to be questioned, "one is a native of Kolkata.
We are probing whether they lured other students from different hospitals to give examinations for original students," the police said.