As more skeletons tumble of the closet, it has emerged that Mohammed Shafi, the father of first-year medical student Muhammed Irfan who was arrested in connection with the NEET impersonation case, has turned out to be a fake doctor and has been practising in Tamil Nadu's Vellore for several years.
The incident came to light after the probe team arrested Irfan, a student of Dharmapuri Medical College. The investigation has revealed that Shafi pursued MBBS at a college in Karnataka in the early 90s, but dropped out in his third. Hoewever, he managed to get a fake certificate and was running a clinic in Vaniyambadi in Vellore district with the aid of some medical practitioners.
“He even got some of his friends, who were doctors, to come to the clinic and examine the patients," CB-CID SP Vijayakumar said. He has been remanded for 15 days by the Theni court, reported Onmanorama.
With his arrest, the total number of father-son duos arrested in the NEET impersonation case has gone up to four. The Crime Branch-CID probe team had already arrested three father-son duos in connection with the case. The arrested include Udit Surya (Theni Medical College student) and his father Venkatesh, Praveen (a student of SRM Medical College in Chennai) and his father Saravanan, and Rahul (a Kerala native who was a student of Balaji Medical College in Chennai) and his father David.
With probe deepening, it is emerging that the fraud is spread across the three states of Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The three students arrested in the case—Surya, Rahul and Irfan—were previously first-year students at a college in Kanchipuram that has been shut down by the Centre in 2016.
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The Tamil Nadu cops had earlier arrested George Joseph, a Kerala native who runs an entrance coaching centre in Thiruvananthapuram. The key suspect in the case is in Karnataka, a report by The Hindu said citing CB-CID officers.
The NEET impersonation case came to light after a whistleblower alerted the Directorate of Medical Education that a first-year MBBS student of the Government Theni Medical College, identified as Udit Surya, had cleared the NEET through a proxy candidate in Mumbai.
