A man from Haryana has been arrested on the charges of luring people keen to work in the Gulf and then keeping them confined in an apartment in Rajarhat to extort money from their families, police said.
Praveen Kumar, 45, was arrested near his house at Sewah village in Panipat, Haryana, by a team from the Kolkata airport police station last week.
He has been brought to the city on transit remand.
A senior officer of the Bidhannagar commissionerate said Kumar led a gang
that was active in extortion and was involved in shootouts in several places in north India.
In September last year, Bidhannagar police rescued 18 such job aspirants, aged between 18 and 25, from the airport area.
All of them hailed from Punjab and Haryana and were allegedly held captive in a house in New Town for more than 20 days while their families were told they had already reached the US but were caught by US federal agencies who were demanding Rs 35 lakh for their release.
The police said Kumar and an accomplice, Manoj Bawa, were the masterminds of the gang.
Bawa has already been arrested by Haryana Police, an officer here said.
“After our team picked up Kumar, we realised that his gang members were tracking the cellphone tower location of our officers and were following us. Our officers then switched off their cellphones, kept changing the routes and booked flight tickets instead of boarding a Kolkata train to get him safely to the city,” said Aishwarya Sagar, deputy commissioner, airport zone, of the Bidhannagar
commissionerate.
The police said Kumar was the 13th person to be arrested in the job racket case.
He has been charged with IPC sections dealing with abduction, wrongful confinement, cheating and death threats.
He was produced before a Barasat court which sent him to police custody for seven days.