New Delhi: The CBI has identified 144 candidates who allegedly paid to obtain leaked NEET-UG papers hours before their scheduled examination for medical college admissions, officials disclosed on Monday.In the third charge sheet filed recently, the CBI named Pankaj Kumar as the individual who, in collusion with Principal Ahsanul Haque and Vice-Principal Md Imtiyaz Alam of Oasis School in Hazaribagh, Jharkhand, stole the papers.
The alleged theft occurred once the trunks containing the papers were delivered to the school from the bank vault after 8 AM on May 5, the examination day, according to the officials.Haque, serving as the city coordinator for Hazaribagh, and Alam, appointed as the centre superintendent by the National Testing Agency for the NEET UG-2024 exam, are said to have facilitated the crime.The extensive charge sheet, comprising over 5,500 pages and based on 298 witnesses, 290 documents, and 45 material objects, details the gang’s method of leaking the paper.It is alleged that Haque and Alam permitted Kumar, a civil engineer from the 2017 batch of the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur, to access the room where the trunks were stored.Kumar is accused of tampering with the trunk’s hinges, extracting a set of question papers, photographing all the pages, and then returning the papers to the trunk, resealing it before leaving the room, as per the CBI’s allegations.