Calcutta, June 12: A 25-year-old youth was today arrested on the charges of logging in to a close friend’s email account and sending mail to 12 reputable US and UK universities to wreck his friend’s chances of admission to their PhD programmes.

Soumyatanu Mukherjee, an economics postgraduate from Calcutta University, was picked up from his south Sinthi home on the city’s northern fringes and booked under the Information Technology Act.

Soumyatanu, the son of a doctor, was later freed on bail. The charges levelled against him, if proven in court, carry a jail term of up to three years plus a fine of Rs 1 lakh.

His alleged handiwork has, however, robbed friend Agnirup Sarkar of one academic year. The universities have withdrawn their offers for admission after the mails from Soumyatanu — posing as Agnirup — turning them down reached their admissions offices.

“Soumyatanu was aware of the universities Agnirup had applied to…. He also knew Agnirup’s Gmail password and he used it to log in to his account and send mail’s to all the universities,” said Pallab Kanti Ghosh, the joint commissioner of police, crime.

The two had been classmates since they enrolled for economics (honours) in St Xavier’s College in 2006. After graduation, Agnirup, son of pro-change economist Abhirup Sarkar, left for Essex University in the UK to do his master’s in finance. Soumyatanu enrolled with Calcutta University, and ranked second in his post-graduation exam.

Both dreamt of doing their PhD at a reputable foreign university and took the GRE last year.

“This is unbelievable…. I just can’t imagine that one of my son’s closest friends could do this to him,” Agnirup’s father told The Telegraph.

He said Agnirup had started applying to universities in February.

The family had been confident that Agnirup — he got a distinction at Essex and recently presented a paper at the Indian Econometric Society with Partha Pratim Ghosh, the head of the economics department of St Xavier’s College — would get into any of these universities.

But the Sarkars were taken aback when Agnirup received a letter from Virginia Tech saying it was withdrawing its admission offer as he had expressed unwillingness to join the university, his father said.

“We could not make out anything from the letter. We got in touch with the admissions office at the university for clarification. But we didn’t get any answer…. After a few days, we got a mail from Nottingham University, in which the trail mail suggested my son was not interested in studying there,” Sarkar added.

Although the family informed the universities that Agnirup had not sent the mails, the admission offers could not be re-issued as other students had been admitted by then.

Soumyatanu, in the meanwhile, got admitted to Nottingham University in the UK.

The Sarkar family then lodged a complaint with Lalbazar’s cyber crime cell on April 27. For the sake of investigations, they were asked to provide the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of their home computers. At the same time, the cops got in touch with Gmail authorities to find out the IP addresses of the mails sent from Agnirup’s account.

“We learnt from the IP address that someone had logged in to Agnirup’s email account from Soumyatanu’s home and we picked him up,” said an officer.

Since the cops had not got much time to question Soumyatanu yet, they were unable to say what could have driven him to mar his friend’s academic prospects.

“A combination of two strong feelings — an intense sense of insecurity and jealousy — could prompt someone to indulge in such an act,” said psychiatrist Randip Ghosh Roy.

“This is a typical fallout of the rat-race syndrome where we have found students slipping into depression because of simple things like the sudden loss of class notes or tutorial lessons.”

One of Soumyatanu’s friends found it incredible that he could do such a thing. “He was very studious and very good in his studies. I talked to him a few weeks back and he told me he had got through to Nottingham.”

Once the trial starts, it will, however, be up to the judge to decide if Soumyatanu can leave the country.