 "Five arrested in Bengal for issuing forged Indian passports to Bangladeshis")
The Kolkata Police have arrested five persons who allegedly ran a fake passport racket, selling forged passports for Rs 2 to Rs 5 lakh each, according to a report in The Hindustan Times.
The group is believed to have illegally issued at least 73 counterfeit Indian passports, mainly to infiltrators, including Bangladeshi nationals, by using fake documents.
According to the report, on Wednesday, police caught the fifth suspect, Dipankar Biswas, in Kolkata's Parnasree area. The other four arrested include Samaresh Biswas and his son Ripon from Barasat in North 24 Parganas, along with two contractual postal employees, Taraknath Sen and Dipak Mondal.
A senior police officer said the father-son duo was probably the mastermind of the racket. Mondal was working at the Dhakuria post office and Sen was a data entry operator at the Basirhat post office in North 24 Parganas. The racket mainly helped Bangladeshi citizens obtain fake passports to stay in India and travel abroad.
The investigation started when it was noticed that there were anomalies in certain documents that had been submitted during the verification process at the regional passport office. As a result, a specific team was formed to carry out the investigation.
During their court appearance, all five accused were remanded to police custody. Authorities suspect that some of the recipients might have already left the country. The Ministry of External Affairs has been informed.
Investigations are ongoing, and officials believe there may be other individuals connected to the operation.
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Fake passport racket across the country
Earlier, in a separate case, the Delhi Police's IGI Airport Unit announced on December 14, 2024, that it had busted several transnational fake passport rackets running across India. So far this year, the police have arrested 19 foreign nationals and 23 agents involved in the illegal operation.
Among the arrested individuals are 12 Bangladeshi nationals, along with agents from states such as Delhi, Maharashtra, and West Bengal. The foreign nationals arrested hail from Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, and Afghanistan.
Agents involved in these activities were arrested in different states: nine from Delhi, four from Maharashtra, three from Uttar Pradesh, and one each from Gujarat, Punjab, Odisha, and Rajasthan. In one such case, a Bangladeshi national used a forged Indian passport to return from the UAE.