Three more arrested in TSPSC paper leak case

Hyderabad: The Special Investigation Team (SIT ) of Telangana police have arrested three more persons, including a woman, in connection with the leakage of question papers of various exams conducted by the Telangana State Public Service Commission (TSPSC).

Two of them D. Ramesh Kumar and Shameem are employees of TSPSC. The police have also booked former outsourcing employee Suresh.

The trio had allegedly scored over 100 marks in Group-I Prelims held in October last year after procuring question papers from the main accused Praveen Kumar and Rajasekhar Reddy, both employees of TSPSC.

With this the number of the accused rose to 12. Earlier, nine accused were arrested and they include two employees of TSPSC.

The SIT hopes to get vital information from the accused about the case. They are likely to be produced before a court on Thursday.

TSPSC is said to be questioning another female employee of TSPSC in connection with the paper leak.

Meanwhile, police custody of the nine accused arrested earlier is ending Thursday. They will also be Aproduced in the court.

The SIT is likely to file a petition for further custody of the accused. It is looking to extract more information from the accused about the network.

During the investigations so far, SIT found that out of 20 employees of TSPSC who had appeared for Group-I Prelims, eight had qualified for Group-1 mains.

There have been allegations that several employees of TSPSC appeared in Group-I prelims conducted in October last year. The Commission last week cancelled Group-I Prelims and three other exams after the paper leak case came to the fore.

Nearly 2.86 lakh aspirants of Group I posts had appeared in Group-I exam conducted on October 16, 2022. Of them, 121 candidates had scored more than 100 marks. The SIT plans to question all these candidates.

The TSPSC had conducted an examination on March 5 for 833 vacancies of Assistant Engineer, Municipal Assistant Engineer, Technical Officer, and Junior Technical Officer in various engineering departments. A total of 55,000 candidates had written the exam.

However, the Commission suspected leakage of the question paper and lodged a complaint with the police.

The police on March 13 arrested nine persons including two TSPSC employees.

According to police, Rajasekhar, who worked as a network administrator in TSPSC, had copied question papers of some exams from a computer in the confidential section of the Commission and passed on the same to Praveen Kumar, who sold the papers to some aspirants.