Mumbai, Jan 9 (IANS): The Central Bureau of Investigation has raided 12 places in multiple states in connection with the ongoing probe into the leakage of question papers of the Western Railway’s competitive exams, an official said here on Tuesday.

The raid operations pertained to the leakage of question and answer papers of General Departmental Competitive Examination of the WR’s Railway Recruitment Centre in Mumbai, and the CBI has recovered incriminating documents and digital evidence.

Among the 12 locations where the CBI swooped were in Mumbai, as well as Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Surat, Navsari, Amreli (Gujarat), Indore (Madhya Pradesh), and Buxar (Bihar), said the official.

The CBI was acting on a December 30, 2023 complaint lodged by the WR Vigilance Department against at least 15 persons including several railway officials and officers of Aptech Consultancy Pvt. Ltd, a private Mumbai-based company which had conducted the exams in January 2021.

The CBI probe revealed that some of the 8,600-plus candidates who appeared for the clerical grade exams, confessed they had received the question papers a day before the exams were conducted, either through WhatsApp messages and others even physically at a hotel in Surat, on payment of money.

The accused booked by the CBI are: unidentified officials of the Aptech Consultancy, Andheri (Mumbai), and railway officials from different parts of India - Ulnesh Kumar Prajapati, Abhay Priyadarshi, Guddu Saroj, Alok Kumar, Jay Prakash, Shivshankar Kumar, Ajay Kumar, Rupesh Kumar, Anil Kumar, Sahid Raza Siddiqui, Bunty, Akhilesh Kumar, Ganesh Kumar Singh, Ajeet Kumar and other unknown persons.

The exams were held for posts of non-technical popular categories like junior clerk-cum-typist and trains clerk, which were conducted at 28 centres in different states, and further investigations are underway.