Thanjavur police bust fake passport racket

TIRUCHY: Thanjavur police on Thursday busted a fake passport racket and arrested six persons out of the eight booked in connection with the fraud.

Acting on a tip off that a few Sri Lankan refugees obtained passports from Sethubavachatram, a 10-member team of Thanjavur ‘Q’ branch police, led by DSP Sivasankaran, commenced an investigation a few days ago and found that the fake passports were supplied by a gang of three, who were identified as Govindaraj (64) of Andikadu, Vadivel (52) from Pattukottai railway station area and Sankar (42) from Rajamadam. On December 12, the team secured all the three persons.

After a detailed interrogation with Govindaraj, the sleuths found that Vadivel and Sankar used to inform Govindaraj about the passport receivers’ address and the latter acted as a deliverer. He was paid a ‘remuneration’ of Rs 1,000 for each passport delivery. “Thus, they had distributed as many as 38 fake passports, so far this year, and among them, 28 were for the Sri Lankan refugees. All of them had paid several lakh rupees to get the passport,” said police.

Further interrogations with Vadivel and Sankar revealed that they had created fake documents with the help of Balasingam (36), a temporary computer operator of Sethubavachatram police station, Fakrudeen (68), a retired postman from Sethubavachatram, Vaidyanathan (52) from Kalkandarkottai in Tiruchy, Sundaraj (49), a Sri Lankan Tamil residing in Woraiyur, Tiruchy and Raju (31) from Kumbakonam.

The team arrested six persons and have launched a search for Sundarraj and Fukrudeen. Further investigations are on.