Calcutta, Jan. 1: An alert following the theft of the Buddha head from the Indian Museum led city police to a fake currency racket with international links last evening.

A team of sleuths recovered Rs 6,96,000 in fake notes and arrested four people, including a Bangladeshi, from a hotel close to the museum.

?The members of the gang, active in the city, went to Bangladesh and came back with the notes,? said Peeyush Pandey, a detective department deputy commissioner.

According to a preliminary probe, the fake Rs 1,000 notes came to the city from Dhaka around 4 pm yesterday.

?Sarfaroz alias Yaqub, the Bangladeshi with suspected ISI links, and his link in Calcutta, Sanjiv Verma, came to the hotel where Sudhir Kumar alias Dipak and Harjeesh Verma were waiting. Acting on a tip-off, we raided their room and rounded up all four,? said a detective department official.

Police said Harjeesh, who is from Delhi, and Sudhir, a resident of Phagwara in Punjab, came to the city on Christmas Day and stayed at Sanjiv?s Jatin Bagchi Road residence in Jadavpur.

The same day, Sanjiv left for Bangladesh. A shoe exporter, he went straight to Dhaka and met Yaqub in the Paltanbazar area. ?Yaqub runs a garment business in Dhaka, where Sanjiv stayed in a hotel for six days. After receiving money from another man ? suspected to be an ISI agent ? the duo left Bangladesh and came here through the Petrapole-Benapole border in Bongaon.?

The sleuths said the hotel room was booked for a meeting that was to decide how the money could be spread in the markets. ?It seems Sudhir and Harjeesh planned to take a part of the fake notes to Punjab and Delhi,? said an officer.

?We activated our network of sources immediately after the museum theft. They were told to inform about anything suspicious.?

However, when the police swooped on the hotel, they did not have a clue about the fake notes racket. An officer said: ?After entering the room, we questioned the quartet and they made contradictory statements. The search followed.?

An officer said the colour of the notes matched the originals? but the paper was not of the same quality.

After examining the notes, police said the printing quality was good enough.

What difference we found the quality of the paper and its rough texture. Besides, the size of the notes is not matching with an original one,? said an official.

DC, DD Pandey confirmed that Sarfaroz had visited the city for several times before. ?He plays a key role in field of fake currency business. We are now trying to find out the total amount that Sarfaroz and his associates spread in the city market in past two years,? he added.