The Delhi Police has arrested four people, including an executive magistrate in the revenue department, for allegedly issuing fake caste certificates to people from non-reserved categories, a senior official said on Friday.
More than a hundred illegal caste certificates were seized from the accused, Deputy Commissioner of Police (crime) Rakesh Paweriya said.
Executive magistrate Narender Pal Singh, his driver Waris Ali, an outsourced employee of Delhi government's 1076 helpline Chetan Yadav and agent Sourabh Gupta were arrested by the Crime Branch of the city police, he said.
In March, information was received about a racket involved in issuing fake caste certificates to non-deserving candidates, Paweriya said.
"On March 13, a decoy applicant from the general category was sent to a person suspected to be a key member of the racket for getting an OBC (other backward class) certificate," Paweriya said.
The decoy easily got the OBC certificate issued by the Department of Revenue of the Delhi government, Paweriya said, adding that the officials took Rs 3,500 from him in return and also uploaded the certificate on the department's website.
He said another operation was conducted on March 20 in which a fake certificate was made for Rs 3,000 by the same set of people.
After sustained investigations and verification of all the facts, a trap was laid and Gupta was apprehended from his house in Sangam Vihar on May 9.
Upon analysing his mobile phone data, chats held between him and the two decoys were found. Besides, snapshots and PDF files of several documents related to the certificates were also found.
On sustained interrogation, he broke down and admitted to having issued the fake OBC certificates from the office of the revenue department in Delhi Cantt.
The officer said at Gupta's instance, Yadav was nabbed and subsequently, Singh and his driver were also arrested a few days ago.
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