Two days after the arrest of another suspect, Dr Shafi in connection to the NEET impersonation scam, his son Irfan has surrendered at a Salem Court. Irfan, who had allegedly been absconding, was remanded to judicial custody till October 9. According to the latest reports, the police have also picked up Vaniyambadi based broker Govindaraj, another important accused in the case.
On Sunday, the CB CID arrested Dr Shafi who owns a private clinic in Vaniyambadi. According to CB CID sources, he had gotten his son admission in a medical college in Tamil Nadu by paying an impostor to write his NEET exam. Sources further alleged that Dr Shafi possibly introduced the broker Rasheed to other parents who used impostors to write the exams of their wards.
Irfan's lawyer Sreenivasan however has denied the allegations.
"As per the information he has given he didn't study in the Dharmapuri college. He is studying in Mauritius since November. Only police can tell how his documents were found there. Police has arrested his father and is torturing his family. So to save himself and cooperate with police investigation, he surrendered," the lawyer told the media.
Others arrested in connection to the case are - Saravanan who runs a travel company and Davis who is a sub-contractor for laying internet cables.
According to the investigation, these parents met the broker Rasheed, and got impersonators to write exams for their wards – Praveen, Rahul and Abhirami respectively. While Praveen was a student at SRM Medical College, Rahul was pursuing a medical degree at Sree Balaji Medical College.
These arrests were made less than a week after Udit Surya, a student from Theni Medical College, was found to have used a proxy candidate who wrote the NEET exam for him in Mumbai and cleared it. Udit, along with his parents, was arrested from Tirupati on Thursday after they went missing from their house in Chennai. The impersonator allegedly attended classes for 20 days before Udit Surya replaced him. The scam came to light after the dean of the college conducted an internal probe verifying the documents of first-year students.