Armyman held for recruitment paper leak, 2 under scanner

LUCKNOW: With the arrest of an army personnel from Lucknow Cantonment area, UP Special Task Force (STF) on Tuesday claimed to have unearthed a racket involved in leaking question papers of army tradesman recruitment tests held in Varanasi and Amethi on Sunday.

Role of two army clerks in the question paper leak is also under scanner and the STF officials are collecting details about them.

The arrested accused was identified as Praveen Vishwas Jagtap, a resident of Maharashtra’s Satara district. He was earlier posted as nayak in 9, Maratha Regiment at Jamnagar, Gujarat and presently at Bombay Engineer Group’s Khadki Centre in Pune.

“We learnt about the paper leak a few days ago and managed to get the papers circulated on WhatsApp on the eve of the examinations. When matched with Sunday’s examination papers, the papers circulated on WHatsApp were found to be genuine,” S Anand, additional superintendent of police (ASP), STF told HT.

When army’s zonal recruitment office in Lucknow Cantt also confirmed the authenticity of the leaked question papers, a trap was laid to arrest Jagtap near Somnath Gate on Monday night, he said. During interrogation, Jagtap confessed that he managed to get the question papers with the help of subedar major Guru Charan Singh and subedar major Rajesh Kumar Yadav, both posted as clerks in Amethi and Varanasi respectively.

“The accused had circulated the papers among job aspirants and minted money from them,” said Anand.

Jagtap told cops that he came in contact with the two clerks during recruitment process at Lucknow in 2014 and they had collected about `9 lakh from job aspirants by providing them question papers in advance. While Jagtap received `2 lakh, the remaining amount was distributed between the two clerks.

Jagtap told cops that they had tried to leak test papers in 2015 also but failed and the two clerks were in contact with some other army personnel, who helped in leaking question papers of different army recruitment tests.

Colonel VK Mal lodged an FIR against the trio with Cantt police station in the matter and further efforts were on to collect details of two other clerks, Anand said.

The army recruitment office has cancelled the recruitment tests held on April 24.

The tests will be conducted again on May 15.