Patna: Some of the missing matriculation (Class X) examination answer sheets were sold for Rs 8,500, a scrap dealer has told police after the special investigation team (SIT) recovered few of the 42,000 answer sheets from him.

Pappu Gupta, the scrap dealer, was arrested from Gopalganj on Saturday. He told the police that he had purchased 121kg original answer sheets. The SIT recovered a few of them from his shop at Haziapur on the outskirts of Gopalganj, 210km from Patna.

Pappu told the interrogators that he had purchased the answer sheets on the persuasion of Chhatu Singh, peon of SSG Girls Senior Secondary School in Gopalganj, about 15 days ago. Chhatu and night guard Ash Pujan Singh have already been arrested.

Pappu, the police quoted him as saying, said Chhatu had opened the school's strong room - where the answer sheets were kept after evaluation from February 21-28 - with a key he had. Chhatu also helped Pappu transport the consignment to his shop at night.

The SIT, headed by Gopalganj additional superintendent of police Neeraj Kumar, has also nabbed autorickshaw driver Sanjay Kumar, alias Santosh Kumar, for transporting the answer sheets for Rs 100 a trip. Plastic bags in which the answer scripts were kept were found dumped at an isolated place near the school.

Pappu revealed during interrogation, the police said, that he paid Chhatu Rs 8,500 for the 121kg of answer scripts he bought.

Gopalganj superintendent of police Rasheed Zaman said the SIT has seized one original script of a matriculation examinee and five empty plastic bags from Pappu's scrap shop. The team also recovered over 200 bags from a bush adjacent to SSG Girls Senior Secondary School on Friday, suggesting that the gunny bags were dumped on the spot while the bundles of answer sheets were taken away.

"Raids are underway to recover more answer scripts," Zaman said, adding that the call detail records of Chhatu, Pappu and Santosh's mobile phones corroborated Pappu's statement. "The three had been in constant touch during the period when the answer scripts were sold," he said.

Pappu and Santosh were produced in Gopalganj court on Saturday, which remanded them to judicial custody for 14 days at Chanave divisional jail.

Zaman said Pappu had purchased scrap from the school earlier too. In all, 26 scrap shops in the district headquarters town are on the SIT's radar, he added.

The SIT on Saturday carried out raids at several scrap shops under Mufassil police station in neighbouring Siwan district. Authoritative sources said raids were also conducted in Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh, in search of the missing answer sheets.

The disappearance of the answer sheets was revealed after a team of BSEB officials visited the Gopalganj school last week to verify the answer scripts of 12 toppers. Answer sheets of three of the 12 examinees were, however, not found in the strong room.