Kolkata: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probing the multi-crore teachers’ recruitment irregularities scam in West Bengal arrested another middleman — Chandan Mondal aka Ranjan — in connection with the scam on Friday.
Mondal is the third middleman who has been arrested by the CBI after it started probing the matter in 2022, the other two being Prasanna Kumar Roy and Pradeep Singh.
Roy is the husband of the niece of former West Bengal Education Minister Partha Chatterjee, who is currently in judicial custody for his alleged involvement in the scam.
Sources said Mondal came to CBI’s Nizam Palace office in Kolkata on Friday after being summoned by the agency for questioning.
After hours of questioning, sources said, the CBI officials decided to take him into custody after he refused to cooperate in revealing information.
He was presented at a special CBI court in Kolkata on Friday afternoon, which remanded him to four-day CBI custody.
Mondal’s name surfaced for the first time when ex-state minister Upen Biswas, who is also a former joint director of the CBI, revealed his name through a video message posted on social media.
In his message, Biswas said that Mondal was responsible for offering several teaching and non-teaching jobs in state-run schools against payment of money.
Since then, Mondal was questioned by the CBI from time to time, but he was not taken into custody.
Meanwhile, after receiving the information of Mondal’s arrest, Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay of the Calcutta High Court, whose order prompted the CBI to launch its probe into the teachers’ recruitment scam, described it as a “very late step” by the CBI.
“What will happen with his arrest now? Nothing will happen. The investigation has been going on for the last seven to eight months. What result will his arrest now yield,” Justice Gangopadhyay asked.
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