The West Bengal Police has arrested the kingpin of a racket arranging fake Indian passports for Bangladeshi infiltrators.
The arrested individual has been identified as Tridib Mondal, a resident of the Baguihati area in the northern outskirts of Kolkata. The cops will present him at a lower court later in the day, and the public prosecutor will seek his police custody.
Insiders from the state police said the cops had been trying to trace Mondal for quite some time after they came to know of his involvement by interrogating three other persons in the racket who were arrested by the investigating officials from Chandernagore in the Hooghly district in January this year.
On getting specific information that Mondal would be coming to Sealdah station in central Kolkata in the morning, the cops of Bhadreswar Police Station under Chandernagore Police Commiserate waited at the station in plain clothes.
Mondal arrived there, and after the cops became certain of his identity, they nabbed him. He is being brought to Chinsurah, the district headquarters of Hooghly, and will be presented at a lower there later in the day, confirmed an official of the state police.
The principal charge against Mondal is that he played a key role in digitally arranging other forged Indian documents like Aadhaar cards, EPIC cards, PAN cards, ration cards, and birth certificates to be used for arranging fake Indian passports for the illegal Bangladeshi immigrants.
Initial investigation has revealed that the racket where Mondal operated as the technical brain had a network of agents in different West Bengal villages close to the international borders with Bangladesh, whose main task was to establish links between the illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators and the racket kingpins.
The cops investigating the fake Indian identity document rackets have identified a specific pattern in the operations of such illegal immigration rackets in this particular chain of crime.
Any infiltrator illegally crossing over to the Indian territory contacts the local agents and, after showing willingness to pay out hefty amounts for getting fake Indian identity documents, is first provided with safe shelter in a village adjacent to the border with Bangladesh, both land and coastal. Thereafter, the agents arrange for a fake ration card for the infiltrator, which is the first step for making other identity documents.
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By virtue of the fake ration cards, other identification documents like EPIC, PAN, and Aadhaar cards are acquired. The last step is to get the fake passports based on these fake identity documents.