BHOPAL: A suspended government doctor has emerged as the alleged mastermind behind an inter-state Fake Indian Currency Notes (FICN) racket busted in Maharashtra’s Malegaon, where two men, including a Muslim cleric from Madhya Pradesh, were arrested recently.
Ongoing interrogation of arrested duo, Mohd Zubair (an Imam of mosque in MP’s Khandwa district) and his aide Nazir Akram Ansari, both hailing from southwestern MP’s Burhanpur district, has revealed that Prateek Navlakhe, a suspended government doctor in the same district, was supplying the FICN to Zubair and aide.
“The ongoing quizzing of the arrested duo strongly suggests that it was the suspended doctor in Burhanpur (MP), who supplied them the FICN. We’re now making efforts to track Navlakhe, who is absconding,” a senior police officer forming part of the special investigation team (SIT) of MP police probing the case told TNIE on Tuesday.
Only Navlekhe’s arrest will help the police in tracking the source, where the FICNs were printed.
“The two arrested men, including the mosque’s Imam are merely couriers who were operating for Navlakhe and those who actually printed the FICN. There could be many more couriers of the racket elsewhere in the country,” the SIT source added.
Like the mosque’s Imam Mohd Zubair, accused in six cases of robbery and investment frauds before being booked by Maharashtra and MP police in separate cases of FICN recently, Navlakhe too was accused in multiple cases of financial fraud since 2022.
Back in 2022, Navlakhe, who was posted at the Burhanpur district hospital, was accused of opening an account in a private bank in the name of the hospital's peon and then parking around Rs 24 lakh. The account was closed after withdrawing the entire money.
Two years back, Navlakhe was suspended after he sold hospital’s equipment worth Rs 25 lakh as scrap. He was reportedly suspended after that. He was also suspected to be involved reportedly in hawala business, cricket betting and human trafficking.
It was while being lodged in Khandwa jail that the suspended doctor met with Mohd Zubair, who was lodged there in multiple cases of robbery and investment frauds.
The MP police’s SIT suspect that it was at the Khandwa jail only that Navlakhe convinced Zubair to become part of his network of FICN supply racket.
Importantly, FICN in the denomination of Rs 500 notes, totalling around Rs 30 lakh have been seized by the Maharashtra police and the MP police from the arrested duo in Malegaon on October 30 and later from the room of Zubair in the Imambara in Pethia village of Khandwa district on November 2.
