GUWAHATI: The police, probing the cash-for-jobs scam in the Assam Public Service Commission (APSC), will interrogate 37 officials.
They have been issued summons, the police said. The Dibrugarh police, who had unearthed the scam in 2016, sent a letter to the State government recently seeking permission to interrogate the officials. Twenty-five of them are Assam Civil Service (ACS) and Assam Police Service officials.
They had secured the plum jobs by clearing the 2014 APSC-conducted exam. According to the police, the officials will be interrogated from June 9. Recently, the police seized over 990 answer scripts of the 2015 APSC-conducted exam from the APSC strong room and later detected “anomalies”. In May, three ACS officers were arrested by the police in connection with the scam.
They are now in judicial custody. The accused, circle officers Bhaskar Jyoti Devasarma, Bhaskar Dutta and Amit Sarma, had cracked the APSC-conducted exam allegedly by bribing its arrested chairman Rakesh Kumar Paul.
The Dibrugarh police had seized the trio’s answer sheets from Paul’s Guwahati residence in November last year. According to the police, two sets of answer sheets of each of the three ACS officers were recovered from Paul’s residence and the office of the APSC. Subsequent forensic tests confirmed duplicity. Earlier, Paul besides eight others, including two members and an assistant controller of exams of the Commission, were arrested in connection with the scam. Paul is in jail.
Last year, Dibrugarh police had arrested an assistant engineer, Nabakanta Patir, after he was caught red-handed accepting bribes of Rs 10 lakh from a woman dentist. He had approached her promising a job through the APSC and demanded the money. But she tipped off the police leading to his arrest. Later, based on his confession, a PSO of an APSC member was arrested. During interrogation of the duo, it emerged that they were working as conduits in the sale of the plum jobs.