Chennai/Theni: Two Keralite senior medical students, who allegedly wrote the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) as proxy candidates, have been reportedly nabbed in Bengaluru. A third person was also likely taken in, however, the Tamil Nadu CB-CID officers are yet to reveal the identity of all the three or confirm the crucial development in the NEET impersonation case.
Those nabbed from Bengaluru had allegedly written exams for Theni native Udit Surya and Chennai native Mohammed Irfan.
Surya, a student of Theni Medical College, and Irfan, a student of Dharmapuri Medical College, were earlier arrested in the case and have been remanded.
The CB-CID will take Irfan, who is lodged at the Salem jail, in custody on Friday. Meanwhile, the Theni court will consider the bail plea of Surya and his father Dr Venkitesh, who is also under remand.
The probe team suspected that a Bengaluru-based gang, with strong links to Kerala, was behind this inter-state scam in which candidates paid money to imposters to write the medical entrance exam on their behalf. The proxy candidates were reportedly found with the help of agents.
The probe team has also received information that two arrested proxy candidates had written the exam at two different centres for one of the accused students. The third person nabbed in the case is the friend of middleman Rasheed and reportedly made arrangements in Bengaluru.
Soon after the probe was initiated, Rasheed had fled to Bengaluru.
Another middleman Rafi has fled to north India, reports said.
The probe team also found that Malayali students Rahul and Praveen, who have also been arrested along with their fathers, had managed to secure fake NEET score cards with the help of the agents and gained admission by claiming high ranks. However, this cannot be done without the help of the medical college authorities. The deans of their medical colleges would be summoned again for questioning.
Praveen is a student of SRM Medical College in Chennai and Rahul, a student of Balaji Medical College in Chennai.
As reported earlier Mohammed Shafi, the father of Irfan, turned out to be a fake doctor and had been practising in Tamil Nadu's Vellore for several years.
The investigation has revealed that Shafi pursued MBBS at a college in Karnataka in the early 90s, but dropped out in his third. However, he managed to get a fake certificate and was running a clinic in Vaniyambadi in Vellore district with the aid of some medical practitioners.
“He even got some of his friends, who were doctors, to come to the clinic and examine the patients," CB-CID SP Vijayakumar said.
With Shafi's arrest, the total number of father-son duos arrested in the NEET impersonation case has gone up to four. The other three pairs are: Udit Surya and his father Venkatesh; Praveen and his father Saravanan; as well as Rahul and his father David.
Admissions under a cloud
The CB-CID is also mulling to check the first-year MBBS entrance procedures of other states, including Kerala.
It was earlier found that that coaching centres in Kerala had picked the imposters. The Tamil Nadu cops had earlier arrested George Joseph, a Kerala native who runs an entrance coaching centre in Thiruvananthapuram.
Stalin demands CBI probe
Meanwhile, DMK president M K Stalin alleged that the Tamil Nadu government had also colluded in the scam and that the case should be handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Stalin further alleged that 50-odd students had won admission to colleges in TN through fraudulent means.
