With the arrest of nine persons including three advocates, Crime Branch have busted a forged and backdated stamp papers racket in the metropolis, police said.
The arrests were made from courts at Esplande, Bandra and Andheri, and 15,500 stamp papers were recovered. Of these, around 300 stamp papers (with face value of Rs seven lakh), were found to be fake, they said.
According to the police, sleuths from Property Cell of Crime Branch received information that a cartel is selling forged and backdated stamp papers outside some courts.
They laid a trap outside the three courts and nabbed accused - Rajbahadur Yadav (45), Sarnath Mangalgi alias Nilesh (30), Mohammad Sheikh (30), Vimlendu Dwevedi (44), Nagendra Tiwari (35) and Sudhir Baranwal (23) and advocates Ravindra Tiwari (30), Haridas Prajapati (30) and Vivek Pande (30).
The accused have been booked for forgery, forgery for purpose of cheating, forgery of valuable security, making or possessing counterfeit seal etc, using forged documents as genuine, using as genuine a Government stamp known to be counterfeit under relevant sections of the IPC.
The accused were produced before a local court, which remanded them in police custody till March 10.
