Nagpur: In order to crack down on mushrooming mediators in government offices, the city crime branch on Thursday raided 13 government offices and rounded up 63 agents, vendors and brokers for verification.
Several documents, including 620 stamp papers of the last couple of years, were retrieved from four vendors who are now likely to be booked. Offences against an RTO agent too has been registered at Jaripatka police station.
Around 10 squads of crime branch were formed for simultaneous crackdown on different government premises, where agents offer to prepare fake certificates and documents against payments. Each squad was under two officers and also had a couple of women cops.
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The raids started at 10.45am from the crime branch’s detection wing before continuing for most part of the day at different places. Each squad was also provided cameras to capture live footage and images of the raid as evidence for future reference.
In one of the raids, crime branch squads recovered fake seals and stamps of Kalmeshwar police station and medical officer from Kapil Tembhurkar, working as an agent at RTO (rural) at Lalgodown on Kamptee road. The process of registering offence against Tembhurkar was underway at Jaripatka police station at the time of going to the press.
Previous years’ stamp papers have been recovered from Pravin Ashtankar, Nilesh Selokar and Geeta Shripad, who were rounded up from city tehsil office on the premises of the district collectorate. Police had laid traps at different places, which may lead to more actions on Friday.
Reliable sources said an agent at NMC office had promised a police informer to issue death certificate of a person still alive for Rs5,000. Similarly, police also laid a trap for an agent who had promised a fake caste and income certificate certificate from the tehsilder office against payment.
ACP (crime) Somnath Waghchaure said the raids were carried out on the instructions of city police commissioner K Venkatesh and joint CP Shivaji Bodkhe under the supervision of DCP (crime) Sambhaji Kadam.
