A retired Kolkata Police sub-inspector, Abdul Hai, was arrested late on Friday for allegedly clearing passport applications without proper enquiry and adequate verification.
The 61-year-old officer retired a year ago and was attached to the passport section of the police’s security control organisation (SCO) prior to his retirement.
“A raid was conducted on Abdul’s house at Kamarpur Sabdalpur in Habra, North 24-Parganas, and he was arrested around 11.45pm on Friday. There are reasons to believe that he was part of the gang allegedly involved in providing faulty and often fake documents for passport applications,” a senior Kolkata Police officer said.
With Abdul’s arrest, the number of people rounded up for the alleged passport fraud stands at nine.
The SCO, with its office on AJC Bose Road near the Exide crossing, is responsible for, among several other things, enquiring about those who have applied for a passport with the regional passport office (RPO) and reside within the jurisdiction of Kolkata Police.
Officers said Abdul was posted for three years in the SCO before his retirementand was responsible for clearing at least 52 of about 240 passport applications submitted to the RPO with several discrepancies in identitydocuments.
“We want to find out if Abdul was close to Manoj Gupta, the alleged kingpin of the racket that used to produce fake identity documents to get Indian passports for foreigners,” the officer said.
“There are allegations that Abdul collected money for each passport application he cleared. We need to verify it.”
On December 29, a special Kolkata Police investigation team probing the alleged passport fraud arrested Manoj from Gaighata, barely 13km from where Abdul lived with his family in Habra.
Abdul’s wife, who did not want to be named, told reporters a police team had visited the house last week when no one was around. She said her husband was later asked to meet the investigators and he did. “He went and met the investigators twice. They told him there was nothing to worry about and that they might summon him again if required. On Friday, a team with police from Calcutta and Ashoknagar arrested him,” she said.
“My husband has had a clean track record in his 34-year career. There might have been some slip-ups in documentation but he was never a part of any gang. He has never received a bribe from anyone and led a flawless life. Officers said he was being taken away in a passport case, about which I have no clue.”
Abdul’s arrest is part of a probe that was taken up following a case drawn up at the Bhowanipore police station on September 27 under relevant sections of cheating by personation, forgery of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and sections of the Passport Act.
The special investigation team has arrested several people in this case but not a police officer. Officers said with Abdul’s arrest, they were now zeroing in on a few others from the force who may allegedly be involved in the racket.
A few among the arrested operated in the Nadia-Bongaon belt, which shares borders with Bangladesh, and allegedly helped several residents of the area obtain Indian passports fraudulently, the police said.
Investigation into the alleged racket of providing passports fraudulently began with the Calcutta passport office raising the alarm after they found that around 240 passports had been issued based on faulty documents.During internal scrutiny, the passport office came across discrepancies in the identity documents submitted with the applications for the 240 passports. The police had allegedly failed to identify the faulty documents.