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Five Noida home guard officers, including divisional commandant, arrested in salary scamBy Hindustan Times

Five Home Guards personnel — a divisional commandant, an assistant district commandant and three platoon commanders — were arrested on Wednesday for allegedly fraudulently withdrawing salaries of their colleagues in Gautam Budh Nagar.

On November 13, the police had registered an FIR and on November 18, the case was transferred to the crime branch. The salary registers were burnt within hours of the case being transferred to the crime branch.

Wednesday's arrests took place after the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath took cognizance of the fire and sent forensic teams to the spot. The CM had also ordered the district magistrate of Gautam Buddh Nagar and senior police officials to make arrests.

The nabbed suspects were identified as Ramnarayan Chaurasiya (divisional commandant, Aligarh and currently holding charge of district commandant, Gautam Budh Nagar), Satish Chand (assistant district commandant), Satyaveer Yadav (platoon commander), Shailendra Kumar (platoon commander) and Montu Kumar (platoon commander).

According to the police, the accused used to forge signatures of station house officers of Gautam Budh Nagar , home guards jawans and other officials to withdraw salaries of home guards absent for more than 50% of their deputation days.

In May and June, Rs 70,7500 as salary of 114 home guards jawans deployed at 7 police stations and few government offices for 1,327 working days were withdrawn fraudulently by the accused.

In July, Gautam Budh Nagar senior superintendent of police had come to know that salaries of home guards deployed at various police stations and government offices had been withdrawn despite them not reporting for duty for around 50% of the time. "The accused used two modus operandi. First, they used to increase the number of working days of home guards and second, the accused used to increase the number of home guards on duty," said Vaibhav Krishna, SSP, Gautam Budh Nagar.

"The money used to get transferred in the accounts of the home guards, which these accused used to withdraw. The home guards were given a tiny portion of their salary to keep mum. It looks like the scam amount can be around Rs 4 crore," added Krishna.