India News | 14 Held for Extorting Truck Drivers Posing as Govt Officials; Rs 1 Cr Recovered
Get latest articles and stories on India at LatestLY. Fourteen members of an interstate gang, who were allegedly impersonating as government officials and extorting money from truck drivers ferrying sand and gravel, were arrested here on Tuesday, police said.
Hoshiarpur, Mar 29 (PTI) Fourteen members of an interstate gang, who were allegedly impersonating as government officials and extorting money from truck drivers ferrying sand and gravel, were arrested here on Tuesday, police said.
Cash to the tune of Rs 1 crore, four jeeps, four laptops, chargers, weighing machines, a currency counting machine, around 22,000 fake receipts, 322 diaries and registers, and 10 mobile phones were recovered from them, the police said.
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To resemble the police and officials of the mining department, the gang had created ‘flying squads', and were extorting money from the drivers on the pretext of a crackdown under ‘campaign against illegal mining'.
They were operating in Pathankot, Hoshiarpur, Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar and Rupnagar in Punjab and pockets of Himachal Pradesh, the police said.
Senior Superintendent of Police Dhruman H Nimbale said in a statement that the arrested gang members hailed from Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, and Uttarakhand.
Initially, the police acted on a tip-off that some people employed at a private mining company were involved in the extortion in Hajipur here.
A case was registered at the local police station on Friday following which the police arrested one of the accused named Rajiv Kumar.
His preliminary interrogation led to the arrests of two more people – Kulwinder Singh and Navjinder Singh.
Based on the information provided by the trio, the police raided a house at Anmol Nagar here and arrested the remaining accused on Tuesday, the police said.
(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)