CBI arrests Rakesh Ranjan in NEET-UG leak case, gets 10 days custody

PATNA: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Thursday arrested Rakesh Ranjan alias Rocky, a key suspect in the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test-Undergraduate (NEET-UG) in connection with its probe into the alleged paper leak in the medical entrance examination.

He was arrested in Patna and produced before a special CBI court which remanded him in CBI custody for 10 days.

A CBI official said searches were also carried out at four locations linked to Rocky in Patna and West Bengal belonging to Rocky.

CBI has arrested 13 people, including 10 from Bihar and Jharkhand in connection with the paper leak, one each from Latur in Maharashtra and Godhra in Gujarat for alleged manipulation and cheating, and one from Dehradun in a larger conspiracy probe.

The agency told a court in June that there was “a larger conspiracy” with interstate links in the NEET-UG examination-related irregularities.

Ever since the NEET-UG results were announced on June 4, protests have swept across India as thousands of students hit the streets against this year’s process amid allegations of question paper leaks, inflated marking and arbitrary allowance of grace marks.

On July 9, CBI arrested Sunny Kumar, a resident of Nalanda who appeared for the NEET-UG, and Ranjit Kumar, a resident of Gaya whose son also took the exam on May 5. It is suspected that Sunny — the first aspirant to be arrested by the federal agency — used the alleged leaked paper provided by a solver gang, people cited above said.

Earlier, the CBI arrested Oasis school principal Ahsanul Haque, vice-principal Imtiaz Alam, a journalist Jamaluddin from Hazaribagh and Aman Singh and Bunty from Dhanbad.

Officials familiar with the matter said Bunty, a resident of Kolkata, was arrested based on a trail of funds allegedly collected from NEET-UG aspirants.