How UP police recruitment exam papers were leaked

The UP Police Special Task Force has cracked the police recruitment question paper leak case and identified the source of the leak. Three men – Abhishek Shukla, Shivam Giri and Rohit Pandey – have been arrested in the case.

According to STF investigation, the leak occurred when the question papers were taken to a warehouse in Ahmedabad.

Ahmedabad suddenly came on the police radar after the arrest of Delhi Police Vikram Pahel’s aide Mahendra Sharma.

An Ahmedabad-based company is responsible for printing the question papers, while transport company TCI is responsible for transporting the question papers to UP before the exam.

However, soon after the exams were conducted in four shifts on February 17 and February 18, allegations of leaked question papers surfaced, prompting the state government to cancel the exams.

How the defendant opened the box containing the test papers

The arrested accused Shivam Giri and Rohit Pandey are employees of TCI. And Abhishek is a former employee.

TCI removes the test papers from the press and stores them in sealed boxes.

In March 2022, Abhishek got in touch with the alleged mastermind Ravi Attri through Ankit Mishra who acted as an agent between the two.

Attri told Abhishek that if he could get some papers from the exam, he would get a lot of money and not even have to work for a day. Abhishek was told that a government job could also be arranged.

In July 2023, Ravi met Abhishek and they planned to get the test papers. Three months later in November, Ravi and Abhishek offered Shivam Giri a fee of Rs 5 lakh for the leak and Rs 15 lakh to Rs 20 lakh after everything was successfully completed.

On February 2, Shivam called Abhishek and told him that the question papers for the UP Police constable exam would be arriving soon.

Abhishek asked him for a picture of the box and the next day Shivam sent Abhishek a picture of the box with two codes on it
Paper.

On February 5, Rajiv Narayan Mishra, the defendant in another document leak case in Madhya Pradesh, came from Bhopal and met Ravi and others in the car.

Later, Shubham Mandal, an expert in breaking sealed boxes, was called in from Patna to perform the task and remove the question papers.

On the same day, Abhishek, Ravi, Rajiv Narayan Mishra and Mandal met Shivam and Rohit near TCI warehouse in Kheda, Ahmedabad at 11:30 pm.

Rohit, Shivam and Mandal enter the warehouse and discover a blind spot – a place beyond the view of the CCTV cameras. The box was taken to a hut and Shubham broke in, took out the documents, clicked pictures and put them back. Since the front of the box was sealed, Shubham had to open the lock from the back.

Shivam was paid around Rs 3 lakh for this.

On February 7, another piece of paper code came in, and the team reconvened to plan to do it again. But this time, due to the large number of people, they failed to break into the warehouse. They returned to their hotel in Naroda.

The next day, they tried the third code again and successfully completed it. Repeating the same exercise, Shivam got paid Rs 2.5 lakh from different bank accounts.

Ravi Attri then distributed the paper to nine others, including those linked to the massive cheating case in Haryana. Vikram Pahal arranged for thousands of students to cheat on a massive scale.

On March 5, when Shivam went to Ghaziabad to meet Ravi, he
and Abhishek were caught by the police.

Police are still looking for Ravi Attri and Rajiv Narayan Mishra –
The main mastermind behind the case.

The Uttar Pradesh government has canceled the police recruitment exam and ordered a re-examination within six months amid allegations of question paper leaks. The state government announced an investigation into the STF allegations.

More than 4.8 million candidates took the exam on February 17 and 18 across the state.