An effigy of health minister Surjya Kanta Mishra in flames during a protest at Medical College and Hospital on Thursday. Picture by Pradip Sanyal

The medical entrance test racket was not restricted to the state alone. It had kingpins beyond Bengal.

After picking up Babli Kazmi from Varanasi on Tuesday for allegedly appearing as a dummy candidate in the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), sleuths from the detective department of Calcutta police arrested Syed Abrar in Bangalore on Wednesday night for possible links with the racket.

“We think Abrar had links with the kingpins of the scam and so we have arrested him,” said an official in the detective department.

According to the cops, Abrar passed his bachelor of engineering (mechanical) from Islamia Institute of Technology in Bangalore in 1999. Instead of taking up a job, he opened an institute — Accent Institute of IT — to coach students seeking admission to engineering colleges.

Suave and moneyed, Abrar was arrested near Shanti Devi crossing, in the Mudwala police station area, by a detective department team camping in Bangalore for the past few days.

A resident of Rabindranath Tagore Nagar, Abrar, according to cops, was a key man of the medical exam racket and played a vital role in getting ‘dummy candidates’ to Bangalore for entrance examinations in Karnataka.

“We have information that Abrar was involved in the JEE racket in Bengal. He came to Calcutta before this year’s examination and held meetings with Ranvijay Pathak and Mihir Jha,” said Ajoy Kumar, the city detective chief.

Jha, a postgraduate student at SSKM Hospital, and Pathak, a final-year MBBS student, are in police custody for hatching the conspiracy of getting students admitted in Bengal’s medical colleges against a hefty fee.

The cops are now hunting for six other people — including Prashant Jha, alias Rakesh Jha, of Bangalore, Himangshu Kumar, Pankaj Kumar and Sonu Kumar — for their involvement in the scam.