NEW DELHI/KOLKATA, Oct 14: The CBI on Saturday busted a fake passport racket involving officials and middlemen in West Bengal and Sikkim, and arrested two persons, including an official of Passport Laghu Seva Kendra in Gangtok, an agency spokesperson said.
Early in the morning, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) teams swooped down on 50 locations in West Bengal and Sikkim, including passport offices in Gangtok, Siliguri, Darjeeling, Alipore and other cities and premises of accused named in an FIR registered recently.
The probe began with the arrest of Goutam Kumar Saha, posted as senior superintendent at Passport Seva Laghu Kendra, Gangtok, and Dipu Chetri. The two were nabbed at a Siliguri hotel while Chetri was allegedly paying a bribe of Rs 1.9 lakh to Saha for the issuance of a passport, they said.
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“Both the accused were apprehended. During a search, an amount of Rs 3.08 lakh (approx) was also recovered from the possession of the said public servant,” the CBI spokesperson said.
Twenty-four people, including government officials, middlemen and passport agents, have been named in the FIR. Shah; Chetri; Tapan Das, posted as Deputy Passport Officer at Regional Passport Office, Kolkata; and 13 other government officials are among those named in the FIR.
Identity theft and fake travel documents issued by government offices are a serious security issue, an official said, adding that the searches are still going on.
“It was alleged that public servants of Regional Passport Office (RPO), Kolkata and Passport Seva Laghu Kendra (PSLK), Gangtok entered a criminal conspiracy with others including passport agents, middlemen and in pursuance of the said conspiracy, the accused were issuing passports on the basis of false and forged identity documents submitted by middlemen on behalf of those persons/applicants who are non-residents of India in lieu of illegal gratification,” the spokesperson said.
The CBI teams searched the passport office in Kolkata, besides places in Salt Lake and Howrah.
The federal agency also conducted a raid at the residence of a passport office employee in Howrah district’s Uluberia in the early hours of Saturday.
He was questioned for nearly six hours, after which the CBI sleuths took him with them, the official said.
“The man is an employee of the passport office. We raided his residence in Uluberia this morning and grilled him,” the official told PTI.
The searches resulted in the recovery of a huge cache of fake documents, stamps of gram pradhans and identity documents, according to officials.
The role of postal department employees, who were acting in collusion with the middlemen and passport department officials to bring back passports sent to the fake addresses so that they could be handed over to the intended person, is also under the scanner, the officials said.
(PTI)
