Gujarat ATS arrests 30 over junior clerk paper leak case

The Gujarat Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) on Wednesday arrested 30 persons for allegedly buying the leaked question paper of the state’s junior clerk recruitment exam, which was cancelled hours before it was to take place on January 29.

With this, 49 accused have been held in the paper leak case of the competitive exam for the panchayat junior clerk recruitment by the state government.

Earlier, 19 persons, including agents and middlemen, were arrested for cheating, criminal offences and other offences after the leak was detected in January and they continue to be behind bars, the official said.

During a raid on a computer centre in Vadodara in January in connection with the paper leak, the call letters, blank cheques and original documents of these 30 candidates, including seven women, were seized, and they were placed under arrest on Thursday after probe and verification, said Gujarat ATS DySP S L Chaudhary.

Chaudhary said these 30 persons had agreed to pay between Rs 12 lakh and Rs 15 lakh to those involved in the paper leak, and the blank cheques and original certificates were submitted as “guarantees”.

Most of these candidates belong to north and central Gujarat districts, like Mehsana, Aravalli, Kheda, Dahod, Sabarkantha, Gandhinagar, Chhota Udepur and Mahisagar, the release added.

Nineteen of the 30 aspirants of junior clerk were from the Dahod, Chhota Udepur, Mahisagar and Kheda districts of central Gujarat.

As many as 9.53 lakh candidates were scheduled to appear for the exams that were being conducted by the Gujarat Panchayat Service Commission on January 29 across the state to recruit 1,181 junior clerks.

Based on a tip-off, the ATS had detained a suspect and recovered a copy of the question paper during the early hours of January 29, after which the exam was cancelled.

Among those held were a native of Odisha, the employee of a printing press in Hyderabad in Telangana, two residents of Vadodara city, including one who operated a computer centre, which was raided as part of the leak probe in the early hours of January 29.