CBI arrests 4 MBBS students, who received stolen NEET-UG question papers to solve, from AIIMS Patna

Students are allegedly part of 'group of solvers' & solved the questions of the paper in Hazaribagh. They were produced before trial court in Patna & have been sent to 4-day CBI custody.

Representational image of students waiting outside Supreme Court | Photo: ANI, Ritik Jain

New Delhi: In a massive breakthrough into the probe of the NEET-UG paper leak case, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Thursday arrested four students of AIIMS for allegedly being part of a “group of solvers”, who solved the questions of the competitive examination in Hazaribagh.

The accused persons have been identified as Kumar Sanu, Rahul Anand and Chandan Singh — all third-year students of the Patna branch of the prestigious medical college and hospital— and Karan Jain, a second-year student of the institute.

Investigators privy to the case said that this “group of solvers” received the question paper after it was stolen from the trunk of the National Testing Agency (NTA) in the town.

This fresh spell of arrest comes just two days after the agency nabbed Bokaro man Pankaj Kumar alias Aditya, who is a civil engineer graduated from the Jamshedpur campus of another prestigious institution, the National Institute of Technology. The CBI had arrested Aditya from Patna and his aide Raju Singh from Jharkhand’s Hazaribagh. The sources in the agency alleged Singh helped Aditya in stealing question papers.

“After the arrest of Aditya two days back, the group of solvers were identified to connect the dots in sequence of events leading to the leak and its spread,” a source in the agency told ThePrint.

The four accused were produced before a trial court in Patna which has sent them to CBI custody for four days.

These arrests have come as a “breakthrough” in the case after investigators had last week arrested one of the “kingpins” of the NEET-UG 2024 paper leak, Rakesh Ranjan, alias Rocky, from the outskirts of Patna.

The paper leak from Hazaribagh was being investigated by the Bihar Police’s Economic Offence Unit (EOU) before it was handed over to the federal probe agency on 23 June.

The Bihar EOU in its probe had found that the solved question paper was received by one Baldeo Kumar, a key associate of alleged mastermind Mukhiya on his WhatsApp which was further circulated among gang members and aspirants who were promised access to it.

The CBI so far has also arrested the principal of Oasis School from where the leak is suspected to have taken place and district coordinator for the NTA, Dr Ehsanul Haque along with Imtiaz Alam, who was the centre superintendent at Oasis School and NTA’s observer in Hazaribagh on 27 June.