New Delhi: A five-member team of officers of the Jodhpur range of Rajasthan Police posed as devotees participating in religious gatherings in the temple town of Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh’s Mathura district. A couple of days later, two of them pretended to be LPG cylinder delivery boys in Hyderabad. Nabbing three accused in a 2021 Sub-Inspector/Platoon Commander paper leak case took intricate planning by the police.
A woman called Shami Bishnoi was arrested from Barsana village in Mathura on 2 July. Two others, named Sunil Beniwal and Om Prakash Dhaka, were arrested from Hyderabad the next day.
They were handed over to the Special Operations Group (SOG) of the Rajasthan Police, which has been probing as many as 69 cases related to paper leaks in the state.
Addressing a joint press conference with Jodhpur Range Inspector General Vikas Kumar, SOG Additional Director General Vijay Kumar Singh said Dhaka was the “wholesaler” for gangster Jagdish Bishnoi, who is accused in 12 cases of paper leaks, including the SI exam paper leak. The ADGP said that he was connecting Bishnoi with a bulk of students who purchased leaked question papers from him.
Beniwal is also a key associate of Bishnoi, while Shami is a school teacher and is facing charges of impersonation in several cases for sitting in examinations as a dummy candidate, the police said.
IG Kumar said that Shami was also wanted in an impersonation case in Balotra district of Rajasthan and carried a reward of Rs 70,000 on her head.
He told ThePrint that the Jodhpur range police had been following the trio for the last 45 days or so, but the teams were readied to nab them about 15 days before the arrest.
“Nabbing the three accused comprised three operations. The operation to catch Shami was named Operation Rajvriksha, while the arrests of Beniwal and Dhaka were the result of Operations Deep Blue and Shivbanga,” IG Kumar told ThePrint.
A visual tip-off
Sources in Rajasthan Police said that the Jodhpur range police had received a tip-off about a fortnight back — a video of Shami in which she was seen performing aarti during a gau-raksha yatra.
Investigators managed to zero in on the location where the video was shot, confirming her family’s inputs that she was participating in religious gatherings in Barsana.
The police had already gathered that one of Shami’s nieces was making frequent trips to the holy sub-town, and when the location of the video was confirmed, the police sent a five-member team.
“We were able to extract one phone number in Barsana, which was used to make frequent calls to Rajasthan, and it was more or less confirmed that the number belonged to Shami,” a Rajasthan Police officer told ThePrint.
Investigators followed Shami to her rented house in Barsana and detained her for questioning.
Cooking gas consumption
The investigating team analysed Call Detail Records (CDRs) of Shami’s phone number and found that frequent calls were made from a Hyderabad-based number — suspected to be used by Dhaka. Additionally, several calls were made from the same set of overseas numbers to those in Hyderabad and Rajasthan.
IG Kumar said that there were nearly a dozen people from Dhaka’s home district in Rajasthan — Sanchore — who worked in Hyderabad. They too were under the lens of the police and their consumption patterns were thoroughly analysed.
An anomaly was spotted by the investigators in the consumption patterns of a man called Dinesh, who worked as a mechanic in a steel railings factory and lived alone in Hyderabad.
IG Kumar said that it was observed that many Rajasthan-based news channels were subscribed rapidly on his cable TV connection and the TV was often in use during the day, which was odd since Dinesh was supposed to be at work.
In addition, there was an unprecedented increase in the consumption of the cooking gas at his residence because the frequency of the LPG cylinder refills rose drastically from once in two months to once every 15 days — confirming the presence of more than one individual in the household.
Shami had also told the investigators that she had been in touch with Dhaka, who had revealed his locations to her — Bengaluru and Hyderabad.
The investigating officers told ThePrint that when the two-member team in Hyderabad failed to locate the exact address where Dhaka and Beniwal were hiding, they scanned the messages and phone calls received on the number suspected to be in use by Dhaka.
One message on Dinesh’s number carried a 17-digit subscriber number issued by Hindustan Petroleum.
IG Kumar told reporters that a senior HP executive was woken up in the middle of the night to seek the address linked to the subscriber number, but the exact location of the house could not be identified until the next morning, when they took the assistance of a delivery executive at the nearby gas agency.
“Dhaka was found in the flat where he was nabbed, while Beniwal, who was downstairs, was arrested minutes later,” a police source said.
Dhaka, Shami and Beniwal have been sent to SOG police custody till 12 July.
(Edited by Mannat Chugh)
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