KOCHI: The police team probing the engineering admission scam arrested a person from Ayur on Tuesday. The arrested is Nandakumar Nair, 38, a native of Aryad in Alappuzha.
According to police officials, Nandakumar Nair is the brother-in-law of first accused Jayeesh Kumar. After the police registered a case against Jayeesh, Nandakumar Nair went into hiding. He was arrested from a hideout in Ayur, Kottarakkara. “Nandakumar Nair was a board member of the bogus institution, Adithya Group, which was involved in the cheating. The accused was drawing a salary of Rs 1 lakh. He is the fifth accused in the case,” the police said.
Meanwhile, the police found that the fourth accused Biju Nair, project head of Adithya Group, had escaped to Bahrain. Biju Nair escaped even before the police registered a case against the other accused persons. “He came to know that the parents of the cheated students were going to lodge a complaint with the police, and fled from the country. We have started procedures to issue a look-out notice against him soon,” the police officials said.
Starting a bogus engineering college, the accused collected around Rs 10 crore from around 200 students providing admission to BTech course. The college in which the students were admitted, functioned in a rented building. The ground floor of the building was used for conducting classes, while another floor functioned as hostel.