By IANS,
Lucknow : Two men allegedly involved in smuggling of counterfeit currency notes into the country from Nepal were arrested in Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh, police said Monday.
Pramod Singh and Babadeen, both in their mid 20s, have confessed that they collected the consignment of fake currency notes — supplied from Pakistan — in Nepal.
“Their main role involved selling of the counterfeit notes to their clients in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh,” Inspector H. Rehman told IANS by phone. Sitapur is 80 km from here.
“Acting on specific information, we nabbed Singh and Babadeen Sunday night after a shootout and seized fake notes worth Rs.2 lakh. Two of their aides managed to escape,” he added.
Uttar Pradesh is fast becoming a hub for counterfeit currency smuggled purportedly across the porous and largely unguarded border with Nepal.
In August 2008, a Reserve Bank of India team unearthed counterfeit currency amounting to over Rs.5 million from the currency chest of State Bank of India’s Domariaganj branch in Siddharthnagar district in eastern Uttar Pradesh.
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.