Mihir Dandapat (top) and Arun Choudhury at Ghatal court on Sunday. Picture by Swarup Mondal

Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) question papers were leaked last year, too.

Arun Choudhury, who was arrested on Saturday while selling this year’s papers, has confessed to leaking last year’s questions to a girl who is now studying in Jadavpur University’s engineering department, police said.

“He said he had sold only one set of photocopies of the question paper last year for Rs 40,000. We identified the girl as the daughter of a lawyer from Ghatal,” said R. Rajshekharan, the SP of West Midnapore.

Rajshekharan, however, suspects that Choudhury had passed the papers on to at least 17 people last year.

The JEE board, which met on Sunday to decide the next step, has not announced when this year’s rescheduled examination will be held.

Choudhury, a lawyer of Ghatal court, and his agent, Mihir Dandapat, were caught on Saturday morning when they turned up at a bus stand in Ghatal to sell photocopies of biology, chemistry and physics question papers to policemen masquerading as customers.

On Sunday, the accused were produced in Ghatal court where Dandapat said before the magistrate he would make a confessional statement.

Choudhury told sleuths of the Criminal Investigation Department that he had collected the photocopies of the question papers from one of his relatives who is an employee of Saraswati Press, the state government-owned press where questions papers are printed.

The CID has identified the relative as Manas Patra, who works in the confidential proof reading section of the press and is now in hiding. The press has formed a five-member probe panel.

The investigators are preparing a list of students who passed the JEE last year from Ghatal and adjoining areas. “Fourteen students passed last year’s JEE from Vidyasagar High School in Ghatal and 12 from a nearby institution,” said an investigator.

Choudhury told the investigators that this year he had collected the set of question papers after one of his colleagues requested him to get them for his son. The colleague denied the allegation.

The police are not accepting Choudhury’s claim that his attempt to sell the papers on Saturday was the first for this year’s examination.