By IANS,
Lucknow : Four persons were arrested late Saturday evening in Moradabad town of Uttar Pradesh and counterfeit currency with the face value of Rs. 100,000 seized from their possession, the police said.
While three of the arrested men were carriers of the fake currency, the fourth was trying to buy the consignment for Rs.60,000.
“We arrested Naseem, Anees, Faheem and Zulfikar from near the Triveni Sugar Mill late Saturday evening and recovered fake currency in the denomination of Rs.1000 and Rs.500”, inspector M.S. Sharashwat of Thakurdwara police station told IANS on phone.
Moradabad, 340 km from here, is barely 150 km from the Indo-Nepal border and the porous boundary provides a safe passage for counterfeit notes in India.
“It is also suspected that the arrested persons have links with the Inter Services Intelligence of Pakistan and we are preparing to take them on remand for further interrogation”, a senior official of the state police told IANS.
In recent times, Uttar Pradesh has been fast becoming a hub for counterfeit currency smuggled purportedly across the porous and largely unguarded border with Nepal.
In August, a Reserve Bank of India team unearthed counterfeit currency amounting to over Rs.5 million from the currency chest of the State Bank of India’s Domariaganj branch in Siddharthnagar district. This followed the arrest of the bank’s chief cashier and recovery of a large amount of both genuine and fake currency from his house.