By Mohammed Siddique, TwoCircles.net,
Hyderabad : The Hyderabad city police have launched investigations in to the possible links between the fake currency racket busted in the city and the terrorist activities in the country. The Hyderabad city police commissioner B Prasad Rao said that the fake currency notes worth Rs 36 lakhs recovered from a gang were printed in a high tech printing press in Pakistan and were smuggled in to India through Bangladesh border.
“The entire operations was part of an strategy to destabilize the Indian economy”, he said briefing the media about the busting of the racket in a joint operation by the police forces of Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal.
Five persons who have been arrested in connection with the racket include two brother Arun Kumar Saha and Naba Kumar Saha from Malda in West Bengal, two persons from Andhra Pradesh Kameshwara Rao and Satyanarayana Reddy and Shoukat Ali also from West Bengal.
Prasad Rao said that the Saha brothers were getting the fake currency from a Bangladeshi citizen Nuftal Shaikh, resident of Shibgunj. He has been identified as the main conduit to smuggle currency notes worth crores of rupees in to India.
The Hyderabad police smelled the racket for the first time when it arrested one Kameshwara Rao on June 16 and recovered fake currency notes worth Rs 10,000 from him. When it compared the notes with West Bengal police, Hyderabad police realized that it was part of a big racket as the Saha brothers arrested by police in Kolkatta had revealed that fake currency worth lakhs of rupees was sent to Andhra Pradesh to circulate in the market on commission basis.
During the interrogation Kameshwara Rao led the police to Satyanarayana Reddy and Soukat Ali and the police recovered currency worth Rs 36 lakh. Police were startled to know that fake currency of ten lakhs was already pushed in to the market by the gang.
The police officials were surrprized to see the high quality of the fake currency. “The currency notes in Rs 500 denomination were so sophisticated that no printing press in India could have printed them”, said Prasad Rao.
The investigators suspect that these notes were printed in a printing press in Karachi.
This is second time that such a huge amount of fake currency was seized in Hyderabad in less than a year. The police had seized fake currency worth Rs 2.36 crore in Hyderabad on August 25 and arrested three local persons Ghouse Pasha, Mohammed Nijat and Khalid Bin Saleh and one UAE national 31 year Alkaz Khamis Obaid Ali. The fake currency was in denomination of Rs 500 and 1000.
That gang had also revealed that the fake currency had come from Pakistan. Significantly with in hours of busting of fake currency racket, Hyderabad was rocked by twin blasts at Lumbini Park and Gokul Chat killing 44 people.