New Delhi: The Bihar Police Friday arrested Sanjeev Kumar Singh alias Mukhiya, the alleged mastermind behind leak of NEET-UG 2024 question paper.
He was taken into custody by the Economic Offences Unit (EOU) of the Bihar Police, unit chief Nayyar Hasnain Khan told ThePrint.
Mukhiya, a resident of Bihar’s Nalanda, was wanted by both the Bihar EOU and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for his alleged role in compromising the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test undergraduate exam, as well as other competitive exams in Bihar.
“The questioning of Mukhiya is currently underway,” a police official in Bihar told ThePrint.
He was taken into custody from a flat in Danapur in Patna in the intervening night of Thursday and Friday, an EOU spokesperson said in a statement.
The arrest comes around a fortnight after the Bihar Police increased the reward for any information leading to Mukhiya’s arrest to Rs 3 lakh.
ThePrint had reported last year that Mukhiya enjoyed clout in Nalanda district as his wife contested the 2020 assembly elections from Harnaut constituency on a Lok Janshakti Party ticket.
Mukhiya’s son Shiv Kumar, who earned an MBBS degree from Patna Medical College and Hospital, was also arrested by the Bihar Police in two similar cases—a Bihar Public Service Commission Teacher Recruitment Exam paper leak and a 2017 NEET-UG question paper leak.
The NEET paper leak started to unfold on 5 May (date of UG exam) last year, when the Patna Police intercepted a car in Patna on a tip-off about some members of an organised gang involved in the leak of question papers of competitive exam.
When the police seized the vehicle, they found the admit cards of four NEET aspirants. On questioning those inside—Sikander Yadvendu (56) from Samastipur, Akhilesh Kumar (43) from Danapur, and Bittu Kumar (38) from Rohtas—the police learned about other alleged gang members.
The police also recovered admit cards belonging to candidates named Abhishek Kumar, Shivnandan Kumar, Anurag Yadav and Ayush Raj, whose father, Akhilesh, led the police to his son, who was taking the exam at DAV School in Patna.
Ayush led the police to a playschool in Patna. “He told us he was taken to the school, where some 20-25 other aspirants were already present, and they were given questions and their answers and asked to memorise them. Ayush confirmed that the questions provided one night before the exam were exactly the copy of the main exam question paper,” a Bihar Police officer had told ThePrint.
In the course of the investigation, the Bihar EOU arrested one Baldeo Kumar from Jharkhand’s Deogarh district, alleging that he was the “architect” behind the leak. Chintu, a close aide of Mukhiya, had allegedly received the solved NEET question paper in PDF format on the morning of 5 May.
The case was later transferred to the CBI as it was mandated by the Centre that the agency probe the larger conspiracy behind leakage of question papers.
The CBI filed five chargesheets against 45 accused till November 2024. The agency alleged that one Pankaj Kumar alias ‘Aditya’, a civil engineering graduate from NIT Jamshedpur, was allowed entry to a strong room inside a school in Hazaribagh where he got access to a trunk containing the NEET UG 2024 question papers.
He clicked pictures of all the questions of a set and handed them to his accomplice, Surendra Kumar Sharma, based at Raj Guest House in Hazaribagh. The question papers were printed and handed over to a group of solvers who were students of MBBS, and the solved questions were later distributed to candidates who had paid up around Rs 25-30 lakh for them, the CBI alleged.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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