Delhi Police arrests two men for forging ministries’ letters

PTI, May 20, 2023, 2:31 PM IST

Two men were arrested for allegedly duping people with fake appointment letters of government bodies, including central ministries, police said on Saturday.

Khatri Iqbal Ahamad, 50, a resident of Narmada district in Gujarat, and Himanshu Pandey, 35, a resident of Kushi Nagar district in Uttar Pradesh, duped high-profile individuals on the pretext of appointing them to the board of the National Medical Commission, they said. According to police, the matter was exposed when Chandan Kumar, an Under Secretary in the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), lodged a complaint about someone forging a letter in the ministry’s name.

The complaint carried a copy of an order purportedly issued by the MoHFW. The letter stated that the tenure of NMC Chairman Suresh Chandra Sharma has ended in January and Dr Suresh K Patel, a member of Gujarat Medical Council, is appointed as the new chairman of NMC and he can take his charge from April 3 to 10, police said.

Kumar told police that the file number mentioned in the above letter purported to have been issued from this ministry did not exist and no such order had been issued by the MoHFW.

The letter was a fake, he said, according to a senior police officer.

After an investigation, police nabbed Ahamad from Vadodara in Gujarat, Special Commissioner of Police (Crime) Ravindra Singh Yadav said.

Ahamad revealed that he worked for Pandey. A team, along with Ahamad, went to Lucknow and nabbed Pandey near Charbagh Railway Station, Yadav said.

Pandey confessed he ran a fake government job racket with Ahamad and his other associates. In 2021, they were arrested by the district Crime Branch, Rajkot Police, Gujarat, in a case of cheating and forging appointment letters for government jobs, police said.

Pandey was released from jail last year on bail, police said.

Once out, he decided to go for bigger targets and made a plan with his associates to reel in high-profile individuals with the offers of appointing them to higher posts in various commissions, they said.

Pandey, a law graduate, had come to Delhi to prepare for competitive exams. During his stay, he met a Kolkata man named Raju who told him that he ran a fake job racket and persuaded Pandey to work with him, police said.

Pandey started working with him, and after some time when Raju died, started his own fake job racket, they said. Ahamad, a clothes seller from Vadodara, used to often visit Delhi’s Karol Bagh. At one point, he met Pandey in Delhi and joined his racket, police added.