Hyderabad, November 15: Three persons engaged by the Regional Transport Authority (RTA) to work in their zonal offices in the city and the neighbouring Rangareddy district were caught by police on Sunday for forgery. They had been generating fabricated registration certificates (RCs) of stolen vehicles and driving licences by taking advantage of their access to the RTA database.
The trio colluded with a RTA agent and a car dealer for making forged RCs and allegedly sold away stolen vehicles in neighbouring states, according to police.
The arrested are P Laxmikanth Reddy of Rajendranagar, a network engineer of Attapur RTA, Shaik Mastan of Malakpet and V Srinivas Reddy of Ramanthapur, network administrators at RTA Khairatabad and Malakpet respectively. According to police, a four-wheeler dealer, Y Bala Raju of Ameerpet and Sultan Narasimha of Rajendranagar, an RTA agent were also involved in the fraud.
Deputy commissioner of police (detective department) J Satyanarayana said, “Laxmikanth Reddy was preparing the RCs as he had access to the database. He also got data from other offices through the other two employees.” Laxmikanth Reddy used to earn `5,000 to `10,000 everyday by generating the RCs. His monthly payment from his job was only `6,000, police said.
He used to prepares original RCs for persons who approached him and also issued duplicate RC without mentioning the word ‘Duplicate’ on it. Similarly, he was generating original RCs by removing the word ‘Hypothetication’ and issuing them to customers.
“We found that any person willing to get an original RC or a driving licence, registered at Attapur, Kishanbagh, Khairathabad and Malakpet RTAs could get them within a couple of hours,” Satyanarayana said.
Police said automobile offenders were getting original RCs to sell away stolen vehicles in neighbouring states with the help of such documents. Central Crime Station (CCS) sleuths investigating a car theft case found that Bala Raju had got an original RC for the stolen vehicle and sold it away. It was only after he was caught that police got to the bottom of the racket.
Police are now investigating the role of other RTA officials in the racket.
–Agencies