Kolkata, Feb 22: The West Bengal Police team investigating the racket of arranging fake Indian identity documents, including passports, for Bangladeshi infiltrators, arrested a kingpin from Jalpaiguri district on Saturday.
The kingpin has been identified at Bipul Adhikari and according to district police, he was one of the masterminds in running such fake Indian identity document rackets for Bangladeshi infiltrators in the entire north Bengal.
He is a resident of Haldibari in the Mekhliganj sub-division in the Cooch Behar district, which also shares a border with Bangladesh. Sources from the district police said that Adhikari also played an important role in arranging for the illegal crossover of Bangladeshi infiltrators to the Indian side mainly through those border points in north Bengal where barbed fencing is yet to be raised because of the non-availability of land.
Adhikari, according to sources, had two points of income, the first being from arranging such illegal crossovers and the second from arranging their fake Indian identity documents. He was presented before a district court in Jalpaiguri on Saturday afternoon and it sent him three days of police custody.
The police are currently interrogating him to find his other associates in the racket. It is learnt that last month two illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators were arrested by the Siliguri city police from the Phulbari area in the Darjeeling district.
During their interrogation, police came to know that it was Adhikari who had facilitated their illegal crossover and was also in the process of arranging fake Indian identity documents for them.
The police team investigating the fake Indian identity documents rackets has identified a specific pattern in the operations of such rackets in this particular crime. Any infiltrator crossing over to the Indian territory, who contacts the local agents and shows a willingness to pay out hefty amounts for getting fake Indian identity documents, is first provided safe shelters at the different villages adjacent to the borders with Bangladesh in the state, both land and coastal.
Thereafter, the agents arrange for fake ration cards for them which are the first step for making other identity documents. By virtue of the fake ration cards, other identification documents like EPIC, PAN, and Aadhaar cards are acquired. The last step is getting the fake passports on the basis of these other fake identity documents.
IANS