Police gets 7-day custody of solver’s gang kingpin ‘PK’

Varanasi: Accepting the plea of police, a local court on Saturday ordered 7-day police custody of the NEET solvers’ gang kingpin Pravin Kumar alias ‘PK’ alias Nilesh for detailed investigation.

Commissioner of police A Satish Ganesh said, “Police had moved a plea before the court for taking PK on remand for interrogating to know about their network. The court accepted the plea and now police will interrogate PK for collecting details of the spread of the network of the gang and also the persons in his contact.”

PK, the Patna-based mastermind of the solvers’ gang busted during NEET (UG)-2021 here on September 12, and his close aide Ritesh were arrested by Sarnath police on Thursday a few hours after the announcement of a cash reward of Rs 1 lakh on him. Both were sent to jail after being produced before the court on Friday.

Before him, other members of his gang including a medico of KGMU Osama Shahid, Abhay Kumar Mehta, Vikas Kumar Mahto of Khagadia, Raju Kumar of Jehanabad in Bihar and father of an aspirant Tapan Saha from Tripura had been arrested by police.

The arrests started after the gang was busted by the police with the arrest of Juli Kumari and her mother Babita Devi of Patna on September 12 from a NEET exam centre at St Francis Xavier School in Sona Talab area under the limits of Sarnath police station in Varanasi.

During police investigation it came to light that 25 aspirants of NEET 2021 were in contact of this gang and 16 of them had appeared in it at different centres while nine skipped the exam. The National Testing Agency withheld the results of 15 aspirants while Biswas was banned for two years from appearing in the exam.