3 more engineers held in Rs352 crore road work scam

The Azad Maidan police have arrested three more persons for their alleged involvement in Rs352 crore road work scam, taking the number of arrestees in the case to 22. A special team has also been formed that would attempt to unravel the money trail.

The arrested persons were identified as Dattatraya Dhas (26) of Mahavir Roads and Infrastructure, and Ashish Jaiswal (27) and Rishikesh Shinde (23) of J Kumar-KR constructions. All of them are site engineers, who were supposed to supervise the road reparation work assigned by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC).

According to the police, the accused were well aware of the money transfers. They allegedly used only a small portion of the funds for road work. Also, along with the arrested auditors, they gave consent for further construction without checking the quality of material, and then submitted a false report to the civic body. In fact, according to a complaint filed by road department's chief Manohar Pawar on April 27, the accused took a large amount of money from contractors to prepare a positive report.

Subsequently, five site engineers – Amar Kamble (32), Vel Nadar (28), Pravin Panchal (21), Dilip Rathod (36) and Viraj Patil (36) were arrested on Monday. Now all eight arrested site engineers have been sent to police custody till June 24.

"All culprits behind the scam will be arrested soon. We suspect involvement of a bigger group of people as the police team got such hints after going through the case documents. Also, the arrested persons have revealed crucial information," said Manoj Sharma, deputy commissioner of police (zone-I).