BENGALURU: The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) has filed chargesheet against the 18 accused in the II PU Question paper leak case to the First Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (ACCM) court, which is also the Special KCOCA Court, on Wednesday.
The arrested are Shivakumariah, the prime suspect, his relative Kumarswamy @Kiran, Eermallappa, Santosh Parshuram Agsimani, Hangal Treasury office assistant Muralidhar, Manjunath N., Thimmegowda, Nagendra, Anil Kumar U. R. , Narayan, Oblaraju, Anil Kumar B, Ranganath, Rudrappa, Gangabyriah, Sujay Arya, Satheesha, and D C Santosh. Among them industrialist Narayan is at large and CID has launched a hunt.
“The chargesheet has been filed under various sections of KCOCA, IPC, Prevention of Corruption Act and Karnataka Education Act. KCOCA was invoked against nine persons as of now. The chargesheet was submitted to the court on Wednesday noon,” said an official.
The chargesheet runs up to 5,000 pages and has over 300 witnesses, majority of them students who were beneficiaries and later turned eyewitnesses. The chargesheet also has details about call data records and WhatsApp messages of around 40 people.
The officials also stated in the chargesheet that other than Chemistry question papers, which were leaked twice, six other papers were leaked by the accused, using similar modus operandi, few days before the scheduled examinations, said the official.
Investigations revealed that the question papers were leaked from the Hangal sub-treasury in Haveri district at the behest of the kingpin, Shivakumaraiah and his nephew Kumaraswamy alias Kiran through Hangal sub-treasury second division assistant Santosh Parshuram Agasimani.
Agasimani had the keys of the room where the question papers were stored. He opened it and let Kumaraswamy in. Kumaraswamy cut open the question paper packets and took out a copy of each of the six subjects. He took pictures of the papers on his camera phone and later inserted them back into the packets. The three sold papers ranging from Rs 25,000 to Rs 1 lakh, depending on the subject.
