The CBI arrested four students of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Patna on Thursday in connection with the NEET-UG medical entrance exam paper leak case.
Sources said that the arrested students would be produced before the special CBI judge as per the procedure.
The agency sleuths had detained them on Wednesday from the institute’s hostel and had taken them away for questioning.
They had also seized their laptops, mobile phones and other electronic devices.
The action comes at a time when the Supreme Court is hearing a bunch of petitions seeking the cancellation of the prestigious examination and a strict action against the people involved in compromising it.
Sources said that the CBI was suspecting that the concerned students were a part of the group that solved the NEET-UG paper after it was leaked.
“A CBI team arrived at the AIIMS Patna hostel around 3:30pm on Wednesday while on a round of the hostel along with the dean and OSD to check the quality and service of food at the mess and the canteen. It detained a student and took him away,” AIIMS Patna executive director Gopal Krushna Pal told The Telegraph.
Another CBI team reached AIIMS Patna on Wednesday evening and sought the help of Pal and his colleagues in identifying three other students in connection with the NEET-UG paper leak case.
While two were detained soon after being identified, one student who was not present on the premises, came and handed himself over to the CBI team waiting there.
“I am getting information now (Thursday evening) that the CBI has officially arrested all four students. Three of them are students of the 2021 batch and are in their third year, while one is of the 2022 batch,” Pal told this newspaper.
The AIIMS Patna executive director added that he would convene a meeting of the administrative committee and also seek direction from the institute’s president Subrata Sinha over the developments.
“We will consider strict action against the concerned students, including their suspension and other steps. We are committed towards maintaining the sanctity of the prestigious institution,” Pal added.
The arrested students include Chandan Singh, Rahul Anant and Kumar Shanu of the 2021 batch and Karan Jain of the 2022 batch.
Professors at AIIMS Patna shared that the arrested students were academically bright ones.
Sources said that the arrest of the students was a fallout of the recent arrests of NIT Jamshedpur 2017 batch engineer Pankaj Kumar aka Aditya from Patna, and Rajkumar Singh aka Raju from Hazaribagh. Both of them are suspected to have stolen the NEET-UG question paper from Hazaribagh. A special CBI court remanded the duo to 14 and 10 days of CBI custody, respectively.
The CBI has so far registered six FIRs in Bihar, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Maharashtra during the course of its probe in the paper leak case.
The Bihar Police’s Economic Offences Unit (EOU) had successfully investigated.
The National Testing Agency (NTA) conducted the NEET-UG on May 5 at 4,750 centres across 571 cities. Over 23 lakh candidates appeared in it.