Forged degree racket busted

— PHOTO: CH. VIJAYA BHASKAR

Big Catch: ACP A. Subba Rao displays forged certificates at a press conference in Vijayawada on Friday. VIJAYAWADA: A seven-member gang producing forged degrees of Acharya Nagarjuna University has been busted by the police following a complaint lodged by the Hyderabad-based United States Consulate pertaining to veracity of an original certificate.
Chennupati Nitish, a Vijayawada student, had applied for a US visa and produced a forged B.Tech provisional certificate and marks memo of the ANU. The US Consulate officials grew suspicious when they found that the certificate showed the candidate having passed out of the ANU Campus Engineering College, which was established only a year ago.
The police on Friday arrested all the seven accused, but the beneficiary student, Nitish of Vasavi Nagar in the city, was still absconding.
Producing the accused before the media, Assistant Commissioner of Police (Central) A. Subba Rao said that they began investigating the case on March 17 on receiving a complaint and apprehended the brain behind the operation, M. Harish, along with his accomplices and recovered a computer and some original blank certificates of the university.
On interrogation, the police found that the gang had sold four certificates for Rs.35,000 each to four students – Ch. Nitish, Ahmed, Sriram and Pavan Kumar. All the four had studied B.Tech but failed.
Two attenders of the ANU press, K. Kiran and Syed Authullah, were arrested, as they stole the blank original certificates and received Rs.7,000 for each one from the main accused Harish, the ACP said. The police also arrested K. Gopi, G. Ganesh Babu and Lakshman Kumar, who allegedly assisted Harish in preparing the forged certificates. All the accused would be produced in the court on Saturday.