Berhampur: After spending a month behind bars, 114 aspirants, who were arrested for the jobs-for-cash scam in the police sub-inspector recruitment examination, walked out of Berhampur Circle Jail on Thursday.
A Special Vigilance Court here had granted these job-seekers, who had colluded with the scammers to pass the test, conditional bail the previous day.
A total of 123 people have so far been arrested in connection with the scam, which came to the fore after Berhampur Police intercepted three buses near the Odisha-Andhra Pradesh border on September 30 and detained 117 people, including three agents. The case was later handed over to the CID-Crime Branch, which arrested six others, including the alleged mastermind Munna Mohanty, who perpetrated the scam by luring the aspirants.
Each candidate had agreed to pay Rs 25 lakh — with Rs 10 lakh to be paid upfront and the remaining Rs 15 lakh after securing the job, according to reports.
On October 23, Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi approved a proposal to hand over the investigation to the central agency due to alleged involvement of an inter-state organised criminal syndicate in the scam.
The Odisha Police Recruitment Board (OPRB), according to reports, had outsourced the conduct of the Combined Police Service Examination (CPSE) 2024 to ITI Limited, a central public-sector undertaking (PSU) headquartered in Kolkata. However, ITI Limited further sub-contracted the job to Bhubaneswar-based Silicon Techlab, which in turn assigned key responsibilities to Panchsoft Technologies headed by Sankar Prusty, the key conspirator.
Sankar, however, is still at large.
