A day after the arrest of three more medical students and their fathers by the CB-CID in connection with the NEET impersonation scam, a common link between the accused has been identified. Sources in the CB-CID tell TNM that all the fathers involved in the scam met the broker through a Chennai-based, who runs a private clinic at Vaniyambadi.
According to sources, the doctor had got his son admitted in Chennai’s SRM Medical College by using an impersonator to write the NEET exam. Following this, he recommended the same method to Saravanan who runs a travel company, Davis who is a sub-contractor for laying internet cables, and to Madhavan, a medical shop owner. Convinced by the plan, the fathers then met the broker Rasheed, and got impersonators to write exams for their wards – Praveen, Rahul and Abhirami respectively. While Praveen was a student at SRM Medical College, Rahul was pursuing a medical degree at Sree Balaji Medical College and Abhirami at Sathya Sai Medical College.
“The doctor, his son and the broker are currently absconding. We will have to nab at least one of them to understand the intricate details of this scam,” the CB-CID source tells TNM. “The others have all admitted to the impersonation and have said that it was a lapse of judgement on their part,” he adds.
The CB-CID suspects that their investigation into the case could end after the arrests of the absconding accused. Across Tamil Nadu, medical colleges have conducted a verification of students based on their NEET documents. But the possibility remains that the scam was executed across the country.
The three arrests were made less than a week after Udit Surya, a student from Theni Medical College, was found to have used a proxy candidate who wrote the NEET exam for him in Mumbai and cleared it. Udit, along with his parents, were arrested from Tirupati on Thursday after they went missing from their house in Chennai. The impersonator allegedly attended classes for 20 days before Udit Surya replaced him. The scam came to light after the dean of the college conducted an internal probe reverifying the documents of first-year students.