Manas Patra at CID headquarters. A Telegraph picture

Manas Patra took advantage of lax security at the state-run Saraswati Press to leak question papers of the joint entrance examination (JEE) 2008, police said.

“He just kept the manuscripts in his handbag and walked out of the compound,” said a CID official who interrogated the press employee on Thursday.

Patra, a Konnagar resident, was netted in Howrah on Tuesday while he was travelling with wife Meena on a bus. The arrest followed a tip-off from Meena.

Patra reportedly told the police during interrogation that he did not face any difficulty while coming out of the press with the manuscripts of this year’s physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology papers. “I knew security was lax. No one searched my bag,” Patra reportedly told the CID team grilling him.

Saraswati Press managing director Subodh Majumdar, however, said all employees are frisked when they move from one section to another and also when they leave the press.

“Patra was the custodian of the question papers when they were sent to him for proofreading. So, the guards might have allowed him to move with the papers from the proof-reading section to the typing section. At the main gate, he must have pulled off a trick,” said Majumdar.

The sleuths’ gaze turned on Patra, remanded in police custody till May 7, after the arrest of his cousin Arun Choudhury and another man in Ghatal, West Midnapore, last Saturday morning. The duo were caught while selling JEE papers to two plainclothes officers a day before the test was scheduled to be held.

P. Nirajnayan, the special inspector-general of CID, did not rule out the possibility of the involvement of other press employees in the scam. “We have examined two more employees.”