Bengal school job case: CBI collects handwriting specimens of accused
Kolkata: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probing the cash-for-school job case in West Bengal has collected the handwriting specimen of an accused middleman and six of his sub-agents to carry forward the investigation.
Sources said the handwriting specimens collected will be matched with the texts in some diaries, recovered by the investigating officials, which contain some details of the payments in the alleged scam.
The arrested middleman whose handwriting specimens have been collected by the investigating officials is Arun Hazra. He has already been named as an accused in the charge sheet filed by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), which is conducting a parallel probe into the school job case.
Similarly, handwriting specimens of six of Hazra’s sub-agents have also been collected.
Sources added that as per texts of the recovered diaries, Hazra handed over a massive amount of around Rs 39 crore to another prime accused in the case, Sujay Krishna Bhadra. The money was collected from eligible candidates for getting jobs in state-run schools.
Of that amount around Rs 12 crore was for posts of primary teachers, Rs 15 crore was for Group-D non-teaching staff, Rs 9 crore for Group-C non-teaching staff, and Rs 3 crore for other posts.
Earlier, the CBI had also collected the voice samples of both Hazra and Bhadra in the matter.
Last week, the “statement” of Kalyanmoy Bhattacharya, the son-in-law of the former West Bengal education minister and Trinamool Congress secretary general, Partha Chatterjee, was recorded at the court of Chief Metropolitan Magistrate in Kolkata.
After that, the court approved his plea for being exempted as an accused in the case. Chatterjee is still behind the bars, though almost all other accused individuals in the case are currently out on bail.
The trial process in the matter at the special court of PMLA in Kolkata has already started. Although Chatterjee has been granted bail in the ED-registered case in the matter, he is still behind bars because of a parallel case against him registered by the CBI