Uttar Pradesh police have busted a fake police station in Noida and arrested six people hailing from Bengal who were operating it.
Acting on a tip-off, the police on Sunday night swooped on a building in Sector 70 that had a signboard with “International Police and Crime Investigation Bureau” written on it. From inside, it looked like any other police station. The accused had also developed a website (www.intlpcrib.in) to lend credibility to their phony operations.
The arrests were made on Monday morning following a preliminary round of interrogation.
The head of the gang was identified as Bibhas Chandra Adhikari, 57. The others are his son Arghya Adhikari, 27, and associates Pintu Pal, 27, Samad Pal, 25, Babul Chandra Mandal, 27 and Ashish Kumar, 57.
The police have seized six cheque books, nine identity cards, ₹43,000 in cash, nine mobile phones, 17 rubber stamps and letterheads from the office, which was opened
15 days ago.
“Bibhas, his son Arghya, and their associates Samad and Pintu are from Birbhum in Bengal. Babul and Ashish are from North 24-Parganas and Kolkata, respectively. We have also recovered some documents of the ministries of tribal affairs, Ayush and social justice and empowerment from their office. The interrogation is on. We will be able to reveal more about them after a while,” Shakti Mohan Awasthi, deputy commissioner of police of Central Noida, told reporters.
He said the gang used to con people by promising to expedite their pending work at the ministries and other police stations in exchange for money. “We suspect that they were also involved in money laundering,” Awasthi said without going into details.
Awasthi said Bibhas was earlier arrested in a forgery case in Birbhum.
On July 25, the special task force of Uttar Pradesh police had busted a fake embassy in Ghaziabad, barely 30km from Noida, and arrested 47-year-old Harsh Vardhan Jain, who claimed to be a diplomat of bogus entities such as Saborga, Poulvia and Londonia.
Police sources said the fake police station, like the fake embassy, was also operating from a rented house. The gang members used to identify themselves as police and intelligence personnel from central agencies.
“They would tell their victims that they were wanted by Interpol and extort money by promising to help them get off the hook. They had also targeted victims of alleged police atrocities by assuring them to take up their matter with the International Human Rights Commission,” said a policeman.
Sources claimed Bibhas is a former president of Birbhum’s Nalhati II Block unit of the Trinamool Congress. He was appointed by Anubrata Mondal, aka Kesto, the then Birbhum district president of the party. Anubrata was suspended from the party after the CBI arrested him in 2022 in the multi-crore cattle-smuggling case.
Bibhas had also set up a large ashram at Krishnapur village in Nalhati that several political leaders, from both Trinamool and the BJP, used to visit. He also used to own multiple educational institutions, particularly teachers’ training institutes.
Before the Noida incident, Bibhas’s name had surfaced in the primary school recruitment scam in Bengal. Soon after Trinamool MLA Manik Bhattacharya’s arrest in the teacher recruitment scam in 2022, the Enforcement Directorate had conducted a search at a flat on Amherst Street in Calcutta, which they claimed was linked to Bibhas.
After Anubrata’s arrest in the cattle-smuggling case, Bibhas had floated a new political outfit called the All India Arya Mahasabha. A Trinamool source in Birbhum claimed he was expelled by the party over his fraudulent activities.