Fake passport 'racket': CBI raids 50 sites, arrests two

Fake Passports and other documents were seized by CBI officials during a search operation in West Bengal and Gangtok

PTI, New Delhi/ Kolkata, October 14, 2023 : The CBI on Saturday busted a fake passport racket involving officials and middlemen in West Bengal and Sikkim, and arrested two persons, including an official of the Passport Laghu Seva Kendra in Gangtok, an agency spokesperson said. 

Early in the morning, CBI teams swooped down on 50 locations in West Bengal and Sikkim, including passport offices in Gangtok, Siliguri, Darjeeling, Alipore and other cities and premises of accused named in an FIR registered recently.

The probe began with the arrest of Goutam Kumar Saha, posted as senior superintendent at Passport Seva Laghu Kendra, Gangtok, and Dipu Chetri. The two were nabbed at a Siliguri hotel when Chetri was allegedly paying a bribe of Rs 1.9 lakh to Saha for passport issuance, they said.

“Both were apprehended. During search, Rs 3.08 lakh was also recovered from the possession of the public servant,” the CBI spokesperson said.

Twenty-four persons, including government officials, middlemen and passport agents, have been named in the FIR. Shah; Chetri; Tapan Das, posted as deputy passport officer at the Regional Passport Office, Kolkata; and 13 other government officials are among those named in the FIR.

Identity theft and fake travel documents issued by government offices are a serious security issue, an official said, adding the searches were still going on.

The CBI teams searched the passport office in Kolkata, besides places in Salt Lake and Howrah.The federal agency also conducted a raid at the residence of a passport office employee in Howrah district's Uluberia in the early hours of Saturday.

He was questioned for nearly six hours, after which the CBI sleuths took him with them, the official said. "The man is an employee of the passport office. We raided his residence in Uluberia this morning and grilled him," the official said.

The searches resulted in the recovery of a huge cache of fake documents, stamps of gram pradhans and identity documents, according to officials.— PTI

Fake documents seized

The search resulted in the recovery of a huge cache of fake documents, stamps of village heads and identity documents.

Among those arrested is Goutam Kumar Saha, Senior Superintendent of the Passport Laghu Seva Kendra in Gangtok.