800 more MPPEB scam accused to be nabbed in 5 months: Government

BHOPAL: Nearly 2,000 accused in the sensational multi-layered Madhya Pradesh Professional Board Examination (MPPEB) scam have been arrested so far while around 800 who are yet at large would be nabbed in around five months, state Home Minister Babulal Gaur said today.

"Nearly 2,000 people, including former minister Laxmikant Sharma, Sri Aurobindo Institute of Medical Science (SAIMS) chairman Vinod Bhandari and former MPPEB official Pankaj Trivedi have been arrested so far by the Special Task Force (STF) which is probing the sensational scam," Gaur told here PTI.

"Around 800 more accused are yet to be arrested and they would be caught in five months," Gaur said, adding that the Supreme Court had granted four more months to the STF to complete its probe.

The home minister said there is no need for a CBI probe into the scam as demanded by Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh and others, since the probe is on under strict supervision of the MP High Court which constituted the SIT.

He also dismissed the Congress general secretary's demand that a hard disk in connection with the case should be sent to a Chandigarh-based forensic science laboratory, saying that the facility in Ahmedabad is competent to deal with such cases.

Congress general secretary and others including former Union ministers Kamal Nath and Jyotiraditya Scindia as well as senior Supreme Court advocates like K T S Tulsi and Vivek Tankha alleged in a joint press conference on February 16, claiming that the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister had made recommendations to select 48 candidates in the Contractual Teacher Group II exam.

Besides, Digvijay Singh had also submitted documents along with an affidavit to the Special Investigation Team (SIT) alleging that an excel sheet recovered from the hard disk of a seized computer had been tempered by removing references to 'CM' at 48 places," he said.