GUWAHATI: Assam police have arrested 13 Assam Civil Service (ACS) and Assam Police Service (APS) officers on Wednesday in connection with the jobs-for-cash scam in that rocked Assam Public Service Commission (APSC) during the previous Congress regime.
The 14 officers who belonged to the 2013 batch of officers recruited by the APSC, were arrested from different districts in the wee hours of Wednesday. The police conducted a simultaneous searches to arrest these officials in the wee hours on SWednesday. Police officials said 11 more officers were likely to be arrested in the next few days.
The arrests came after the investigating team headed by SS Panesar, Additional SP, Dibrugarh, received forensic reports of hand writing samples of these 25 officers who were put through a handwriting test in June this year following allegation that they had got selected to the coveted services through fraudulent means. The handwriting samples were sent to five forensic laboratories in the country.
Those arrested till now include ten Assam Civil Service (ACS) officers and four of the Assam Police Service (APS).
The arrested officers were brought to headquarter of the Special Branch of Assam Police here. Four of accused officials — Rajorshi Sen Deka, Geetali Doley, Kamal Debnath and Kumal Das — have gone into hiding even as police claimed that they would soon be arrested as their mobile phones have been traced. Thirteen more officers will be arrested soon.
Earlier, three ACS officials of the same batch were dismissed from the service because their unfair selection into the coveted service.
The scandal in the APSC took place during the tenure of the erstwhile Congress government of headed by Tarun Gogoi. The APSC was headed Rakesh Kumar Paul at its Chairman when the scam took place. Paul who was a nondescript lawyer who later served as a notary, was appointed by the Congress government as APSC member in 2008 and as chairman in 2013. He was earlier arrested in November 2016 in connection with the scam and still lodged in jail.
A massive job scam in the APSC was unearthed with the arrest of a government engineer in Dibrugarh in October last year, who allegedly collecting cash on behalf of APSC chairman Rakesh Kumar Paul. He was arrested on the basis of a complaint lodged by a lady dentist who was demanded money for job by the engineer.
Two APSC members Samedur Rahman and Basanta Kumar Doley have also arrested in connection with the scam so far and are lodged in jail.
The arrested officers are: Pallabika Sarma Choudhury, Dipankar Khanikar, Himangshu Choudhury, Aniruddha Roy, Debajit Bora, Amarjit Das , Sudipta Goswami Bharadwaj, Raju Saha, Dithun Borgayari and Kunal Das (all Assam Civil Service) and Sabira Imran, Jayanta Kumar Das, Hemanta Hillol Sakia, Harsha Jyoti Bora (all Assam Police Service).
(EoM)